Laconic, iconic Redford bridged eras

Opinion

With onscreen charisma, offscreen activism and ineffable cool, Robert Redford, who died Sept. 16 at age 89, bridged genres and eras.

Redford retained a sense of Old Hollywood movie-star glamour, but he could also suggest gritty, scruffy 1970s naturalism. As a younger man, he embodied a certain kind of all-American golden-boy beauty — with that tousle of blond hair and sudden, disarming smile — but he seemed relieved when his looks became a side issue.

He divided critics on whether he could act. Some accused him of being emotionally opaque, while others believed his characteristic screen persona — simultaneously charming and withholding — is what drew us to watch him, over and over.

He was both iconically famous and famously private.

And at the height of his wealth and celebrity, he helped establish what is now called the Sundance Film Festival, using his mainstream success to make a space for up-and-coming indie talent.

Like many actors starting in the early 1960s, Redford got his first roles in television. In The Twilight Zone episode Nothing in the Dark, he played Death as a young man, impossibly handsome and surprisingly tender.

The 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a revisionist western from George Roy Hill that paired Redford with the equally gorgeous Paul Newman, made his name, with Redford turning in a loose, laconic, likable performance as an outlaw antihero. In 1973, Redford once again partnered with Newman in The Sting. Accessorized with ragtime music from Scott Joplin and sharp-tailored suits from Edith Head, the two played confidence men with loads of style and their own moral code.

Redford captured the disillusioned zeitgeist of the ’70s with films like The Candidate, about a naive young hopeful in a California senate race, whose idealism is rubbed off by the cynicism of the political process, and Three Days of the Condor, a paranoid thriller in which a CIA desk guy gets drawn into a shadowy conspiracy. “I’m not a field agent,” he keeps saying. “I just read books.”

In another kind of ’70s film, Jack Clayton’s version of The Great Gatsby, Redford was cast as the title character, dressed by Ralph Lauren in impeccably WASP-y duds. Critics were divided over whether his performance was hollow or whether he was just accurately conveying what writer F. Scott Fitzgerald saw as the emptiness of Gatsby’s American Dream.

Redford brought athletic skill and physical daring to many of his roles, playing a barnstorming early aviator in The Great Waldo Pepper, portraying a driven and arrogant skier in Downhill Racer, and showing off a convincing baseball swing in The Natural. A lot of his projects, as both actor and director, reflected his feeling for the natural world. He played a mountain man in Jeremiah Johnson, hiked the Appalachian trail in A Walk in the Woods, and even voiced a redwood tree for an episode of Nature is Speaking.

Redford pivoted gracefully as he aged. In the 1992 caper movie Sneakers, his character’s attempt to jauntily jump over a counter ends with him tripping onto the floor and telling a crewmate, “I’m getting too old for this.” At this point, that famous face was looking weathered — still handsome, of course, but weathered — allowing Redford some scope to reinvent himself in later-in-life roles in such films as All Is Lost, The Old Man & the Gun and Our Souls at Night.

Redford had also developed a parallel career behind the camera, as a producer, often of projects that explored his political and environmental interests, and as a director.

His 1980 directing debut, Ordinary People — a suburban, domestic, deliberately uptight drama— beat out Raging Bull for the Best Picture Oscar, and certain film fans have never forgiven him. Ordinary People is pretty punishing in its own fine-drawn way, though, as it examines grief, guilt and family breakdown. Like many actors-turned-directors, Redford was extremely sensitive to performances, and this movie really was a showcase for acting, in particular for cast-against-type Mary Tyler Moore.

That also went for 1994’s Quiz Show, which starred Ralph Fiennes and Rob Morrow, along with an incredible ensemble of that-guy-in-that-thing character actors, all doing great work.

And Redford’s own best performance? His highlight reel mostly dodges the highly dramatic and the deeply emotional. My own favourite is probably a wonderfully unshowy excerpt from Alan Pakula’s All the President’s Men (1976), in which Redford plays the journalist Bob Woodward, working with Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) to break the Watergate story.

Sometimes called “the Dahlberg scene,” this is basically six minutes of Redford glued to a rotary phone, handset tucked under his chin, talking a little, listening a lot and furiously taking notes, under the ugly fluorescent lights of a busy newsroom.

It’s precise, understated and completely compelling and it manages to make the hard slog of investigative journalism not just morally urgent but cinematically thrilling.

Now, that’s star power.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca