Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [236]
In the first drafts, there were no women in The Last Castle. Then Lurie’s script doctor, Bill Nicholson, introduced a scene where Rosalie, Irwin’s daughter, visits him in prison, and the family dimension opens. Robin Wright Penn was cast as Rosalie. “A couple of years before,” says Lurie, “Robin would have been Redford’s love interest. Now she was his kid, sitting opposite him, reminding him of his vintage.” Lurie found Redford’s sudden acceptance of the scene deeply moving. “I think it was the best-acted scene in the movie, maybe one of his best-ever acting moments. So much was going down in that scene. It was a ritual exchange, the termination of one kind of history, the beginning of another.”
With an October 2001 release planned, David Sameth, the marketer at DreamWorks, prepared artwork for trade ads showing the upside-down distress flag. The movie tested well, and in September, Lurie was in Hollywood, working with composer Jerry Goldsmith on the sound track theme for Irwin. During the second week in September, Redford was in New York for important Sundance Channel meetings, which ended earlier than scheduled, allowing him to fly back west on September 10. On September 11, United 93, the early morning flight from Newark to San Francisco that he normally favored, was hijacked by al-Qaida and crashed in Pennsylvania within an hour of the World Trade Center attack. Amy, now an off-Broadway actress living on the Lower East Side, a mile and a half from the towers, was in New York that day, as was Shauna and her family, who lived on the Upper East Side. Neither could be reached. It took a full day of frantic calls to confirm their safety.
One could argue that a movie about the anatomizing of truth, morality, honor and leadership never seemed so vital but, given the heightened emotion of the nation in crisis, muddled responses seemed inevitable. The Washington Post, reviewing the film a month after 9/11, complained of a movie that “hits us over the head with symbolism” without probing that symbolism, a manifestly self-canceling criticism, in the eyes of some. Michael Atkinson in The Village Voice excoriated the film for fudging the issue of freedom and employing “the Cool Hand Luke paradigm [reshaped as] an inane recruitment ad.”
On the phone to Terry Lawson of the Detroit Free Press, Redford wondered about the appropriateness of releasing the movie at that time, but found himself reconciled. Driving from Los Angeles to Utah, he said, he’d encountered a billboard with the defiant flag—DreamWorks had abandoned the upside-down flag in its marketing and put the flag right side up, in a show of support and defiance triggered by 9/11—and questioned its use in promotion. “But, on the other hand, you think, What could be more relevant?”
Redford’s antipathy toward the government, however, remained clear in letters he wrote to the Los Angeles Times and interviews conducted on National Public Radio, a forum he much admired. On the surface he appeared conciliatory: “We have to hope there are some smart minds holding court right now, and we have to support them and believe in ourselves as a country and a people and as an idea.” But he was still, as Rolling Stone had labeled him just twelve days before 9/11, a “hot dissident”; if the Bush administration had a list of enemies, said Rolling Stone, Redford hovered near the top of it. Wary of appearing unpatriotic, he was still cautioning about the risk of public manipulation in crises: “As the country pulls together we can run dangerously close to a kind of jingoism that eliminates other aspects of democracy, like free speech.” He opposed the extension of the war from Afghanistan into Iraq, he said, but was keen that the challanges at home were not forgotten. “Another symbol of patriotism is the land and how we feel about it. Preservation of the environment should be part of our national defense. We