Robert Redford — the actor, Oscar-winning director, Sundance Institute and Festival founder, environmentalist and activist, who died Tuesday, Sept. 16, at 89 — has been mourned with many tributes, and rightly so.
He was a gifted movie star but more important, he was a gifted artist and humanitarian whose best films blended art, commerce and civics without being pretentious, crass or preachy. You think of the reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein following the truth about Watergate to its painful conclusion in “All the President’s Men” (1976), in which he played Woodward. Or the family who comes to understand that healing after trauma is not necessarily perfect in “Ordinary People” (1980), for which he won an Oscar in his directorial debut. Or the minister who accepts the loss of his wayward son with compassion for that son, himself and others in “A River Runs Through It” (1992), another sparkling directorial effort.
A man who had a front-row seat to familial loss and the darkness it can engender, Redford never made any bones about his liberal politics but neither did he impose his views, brutalize you for yours or play the sanctimonious martyr. He understood that free speech as defined by Article 1 of the United States Constitution prevents the government from persecuting you for your views. It doesn’t mean, however, that you can yell “fire” in a crowded movie theater when there isn’t any. For Redford, speech was meaningless without action that advocated for the land and the people and animals that are a part of it.
You have to imagine that action and words must’ve meant a great deal to a man who could command attention just by standing still — he was that beautiful, more so than many of his leading ladies through whose eyes we came to see him as a not-so-obscure object of desire. Think of Barbra Streisand touching his sleeping figure, the moon goddess to his Endymion, in “The Way We Were” (1973). Or Meryl Streep hunting his big-game hunter in “Out of Africa” (1985). Even Jane Fonda — with whom he made four films, “The Chase” (1963), “Barefoot In the Park” (1967), “The Electric Horseman” (1979) and “Our Souls at Night” (2017); and who could certainly match him in beauty — said that she just loved kissing him on film.
Long before Brad Pitt in “Meet Joe Black,” Redford made even death appealing in an episode of “The Twilight Zone.”
We often hear about the male gaze in which men objectify women, but Redford was strong enough and secure enough as a man to allow his female co-stars (and viewers) to turn the tables, and an admiring eye, on him. Still, it couldn’t have been easy for a man who bristled at what he thought of as all that superficial Hollywood stuff, and it’s not surprising that perhaps his most memorable co-star, one with whom he would develop a real bromance, was a man who was surely his equal in looks and movie stardom — Paul Newman in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969) and “The Sting” (1973). Perhaps each took the male beauty/movie star load off the other, although neither was above a certain joking alpha rivalry either.
Lots of people say they don’t care about their looks or life’s superficialities. But the proof is always in the loss. Redford never flinched from it. In “The Natural” (1984), a heroic interpretation of Bernard Malamud’s antiheroic novel about a lost baseball player’s comeback — Redford when to the University of Colorado Boulder on a baseball scholarship — he nonetheless gives us a gilded boy tarnished by the cruel consequences of the wrong choices. It foreshadowed the films he made toward the end of his life in which he presented old age with warts, lines, wrinkles, puffiness and all.
“You know, I believe we have two lives,” Glenn Close tells Redford’s disillusioned slugger in “The Natural.” “the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. With or without the records, they’ll remember you.”
As we’ll remember Robert Redford.