Redford: A River Runs Through It (1992)

Robert Redford has always been a passionate curator of nostalgic Americana, but he brings a particularly elegiac edge to A River Runs Through It, his adaptation of Norman Maclean’s autobiography of the same name. Set in the Rocky Mountains in the early twentieth century, it’s about a pair of brothers – Norman (Craig Sheffer) and Paul (Brad Pitt)  – who come of age against the kind of landscapes that Aaron Copland might have dreamed of, vistas and visions that set out to rival the greatest canvases of American Romanticism. Like Maclean’s writing, it’s textural, rather than expository, a series of impressionistic incidents anchored in Norman and Paul’s love of fly-fishing, which they get from their father (Tom Skeritt), a Presbyterian minister. For him, it’s the closest he can get to “God’s rhythms,” and the film tries to lock itself into those rhythms, with all the simplicity and majesty of a Protestant sermon, as Redford sketches out a series of landscapes that are too imposing or overwhelming to simply calm or relax you, but too tempered by the river to leave room for any more awful or imposing sublimity either. What does remain is a robust, bracing sense of the open air - the Macleans are descended from highland Scots – that makes Norman and Paul feel as if they’re perpetually plunging into a cold, clear, mountain stream, quivering with an ever so slightly uncomfortable awareness of being alive. Pitt’s face, in particular is incredible, glittering with a million little micro-movements at once, until it feels like a kind of Romantic ideal, the vision of rapturous communion with nature that lies behind Norman’s eventual move to Chicago to become a Professor of Romantic poetry. It is the face of Thoreau, the face of Emerson, and that’s an incredibly imaginative and innovative cinematic vision, not least because the rest of the film is quite staid and sepia-toned in its nostalgia, devolving so subliminally that you don’t realise how much of an elegy it is until the very last scene. Still, Pitt’s face is what remains – that and the landscapes it generates, and between them there's a whole world, more than enough to leave your “soul restored and imagination stirred.”