Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [239]
The movie started filming the last week of April 2003 in Kamloops, British Columbia. “I didn’t really direct Bob,” says Hallström. “I got to witness him working.” It seemed clear that Redford was in the process of remodeling his image to striking effect. If The Clearing was an admission of age, An Unfinished Life wallowed in the damage and detritus of time. From the first frames, where Einar starts the daily drudgery, milking the cow and preparing medication for his bedridden friend, to the last, where he scares off Jean’s abusive boyfriend and makes his peace with the new family he has found, Redford seemed experimentally fresh. There was nothing familiar about the performance. What emerged, for those who knew him, was a completely untypical self-revelation. Redford had, said Pollack, “always cherished the theory of keeping something back from the audience.” Here, searching for the essence of late-life despair, he laid it all out. The script helped. The words were written for him. But it was Redford, not Einar, who grumbled incessantly in a chronic, half-audible inner dialogue; it was Redford whose empathy with animals and landscape brought the light to his face; it was Redford who struggled to pass a compliment; it was Redford who expressed devotional love with a mere shrug.
An Unfinished Life deserved recognition—for some, even merited the best actor Academy Award he had never scored—but it was not destined to succeed. Hampered by oversentimentality—and by the Weinsteins’ second thoughts about Lopez’s talent, which induced ridiculous pressures on Hallström to “shoot more of the damned bear”—the movie was lost in a maze of boardroom bickering. When Disney acquired Miramax ten years before, the Weinsteins were small change. Then Miramax grew powerfully as a production entity, turning out multiple award–winners like The English Patient and Chicago and contributing 40 percent of the studio’s output by 2003. But it had never been a comfortable partnership. Michael Eisner never really hit it off with the Weinsteins, and throughout there had been disputes, the most damning of which was Eisner’s refusal to back the Weinsteins in making the Lord of the Rings series, which was picked up so triumphantly by New Line Cinema.
At Christmas 2003, when An Unfinished Life was due for release, the Weinsteins’ contract with Disney was up for renewal and, inevitably, under debate. It was announced instead that the movie would open the Cannes Film Festival in May. When that was canceled, it was to be the major holiday release of Christmas 2004. The delay reflected a contractual tug-of-war. By the time Eisner parted ways with the Weinsteins, An Unfinished Life was all but forgotten.
And so one of Redford’s most important movies, a careful template for his late-life work, dribbled onto screens in September 2005. There was no marketing, and reviewers mostly dismissed it. Kirk Honeycutt in The Hollywood Reporter wrote, unfairly for many, that “the film never realizes its dramatic potential, choosing to take predictable story paths with obvious characters.” Pete Travers in Rolling Stone acknowledged the skillful rapport between Freeman and Redford but hated the “drag-ass solemnity.” And Variety disliked both the movie and Redford, “who seems to be putting his own laconic spin on a part that feels like it was written for Clint Eastwood.”
Was Redford’s performance so lacking? The question is vital, because the barrier he’d reached—age—he’d met with awareness, energy and the highest ambition. Writer Walter Kirn’s observation at the time of The Horse Whisperer provides the plausible answer to negative reviews. Great stars like De Niro and Pacino, said Kirn, are the sum total of the roles they