Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [238]
“Personally it was a horrendous shoot,” says Redford, “because I am claustrophobic, and I spent almost all that film climbing hills in the woods of North Carolina in handcuffs. There was so little money, ergo so little time, and therefore I was always wearing those damned cuffs. It freaked me out, which made achieving the tension easy.” Redford liked working with Willem Dafoe (the abductor), and especially Helen Mirren (Eileen), whom he regards as one of the greatest women performers around. “And [the writers] made a good go of that script—good lines, a good reality.” The best of it, said Redford, was its warm morality. Eileen truly loves her husband. “He is a man who needs to be appreciated, and that gets harder as he gets older,” she says. That line resonates when Wayne escapes Mack but, succumbing to guilt and the moral order, willfully allows himself to be shot.
Redford had never presented any of his own movies at the Sundance Film Festival. But Geoff Gilmore knew The Clearing was perfect for a screening in January 2003. It felt right. Redford resisted, says Gilmore, telling Nozik, “They’ll [the critics] rip me apart. They’ll call it incest.” Gilmore confronted Redford and told him, “Look, I want it for the festival because I think it’s the kind of film we should have, and the fact that you’re in it basically says you’re contributing to the very thing you created. It’s as simple as that.”
Ruthe Stein, writing about the film in the San Francisco Chronicle, welcomed Redford’s stretch: “In his late 60s, with the effect of his time outdoors etched on his face, he’s no longer the pretty boy he once was. Far from hiding this, he seems to relish it, as if it’s liberated him as an actor.… With ageism a constant issue in Hollywood, Redford should be applauded for his attitude as well as for hitting a bull’s-eye.” Stephen Hunter in The Washington Post noted “an anti-vanity film,” and doffed his hat to the marker Redford had set down: “This spirit of honesty extends to the character himself,” wrote Hunter, “which, far from being the heroic Redford of yore, is shown to have been inadequate and far from heroic.”
There was an unquestionable maturation, a coming-to-terms quality, about Redford’s work since The Last Castle. His next choice made clear a consolidation. The project was An Unfinished Life, a Miramax movie to be directed by Lasse Hallström, whose wife, Lena Olin, Redford had remained friendly with since Havana. Hallström was known for his work with the Swedish pop group Abba, but his transfer to American film introduced a unique talent who could straddle art house and pop cinema appeal. The screenplay for An Unfinished Life, written by Mark and Virginia Spragg, was developed by Kelliann Ladd’s company as a project for Paul Newman but inherited by Disney in its acquisition of Miramax. Its first director, Redford learned, was Mark Rydell. When he dropped out, Walter Salles, the Brazilian director, and Robert Altman vied, but Hallström won out. Miramax’s choice of female lead was Jennifer Lopez, a singer they believed was destined for movie stardom.
Redford loved the role on offer because, he says, it was unlike anything he’d ever played. He was to be down-at-the-heels, ornery, bitter and “rich in overt desperation”—another role of extremes. He would play Einar Gilkyson, a farmer in his mid-sixties living off the land in remote Wyoming, where he tends to his lifelong friend, Mitch, played by Morgan Freeman, who is incapacitated following a bear attack. Einar’s spiritual crisis is his inability to recover from the death of his son, whose widow, Jean, played by Lopez, seeks refuge with him from an abusive boyfriend. Einar’s world is upended. As Mitch wrestles with