Redford, Nolte take a hike
Buddy film better when it trades banter for insight
Reading a Bill Bryson book feels a bit like flipping through a chummy encyclopedia: His curiosity is voluminous. If he weren’t so good at stringing together his rafts of facts with spry anecdotes and deflating but illuminating asides, you could accuse him of finding an excuse simply to list every factoid he’s ever encountered on a given subject.
Stripped of this rampaging through the history and science books, the Bill Bryson that emerges in the movie adaptation of A Walk in the Woods, looking like Robert Redford and rarely missing a chance to act politely knowing about everything, is a lot more, um, pedestrian.
He’s less like the back side of a Trivial Pursuit card sitting at the bottom of a pint glass and more like a genial retiree who responds to others’ complaints about being “too old for this” with a crooked smile and a forced chuckle and then a Walt Whitman quote about the autumn bushes bearing the sweetest fruits, or something.
It’s like a soft-pedalled selfhelp version of Grumpy Old Men: Genial Old Men Face Their Decline With Chipper Goodwill But an Inevitable Sense of the Tragedy of Decay. Plus Bears.
Shaken by some reminders of mortality, Bryson (Redford) decides on a life-affirming trek along the Appalachian Trail. From here on, pretty much everything rolls out with a sitcom-y inevitability, Bryson’s amiable foibles playing out in a series of lightly heartwarming ways. He tries to set up his old pup tent. When it falls down, wife Catherine (Emma Thompson, doing remarkably little throughout), none too pleased with his plan, suggests he sleep in there. Buying new gear, he of course complains about the price of everything. A descending trombone noise and a talking dog would not feel notably out of place in this story of a beloved writer rediscovering himself on the trail.
Things get a minor shot in the arm when Bryson recruits long-lost friend/curmudgeonly irritant Stephen Katz (Nick Nolte). Before you ask: Yes there is a bad montage of people turning him down — including such hilarious lines as “Call me when you’re doing something more fun, like getting a colonoscopy,” because invasive but strongly recommended medical procedures are more enjoyable than long hikes, y’see — and yes Katz is his last choice. But it’s either him or giving up the dream — and if our dreams die, might not we also?
Nolte is presented as a livedin old crank, who speaks with the timbre of a rusty screen door and remains thoroughly deluded about his physical prowess, which is roughly equivalent to a broken La-ZBoy.
He is at least some welcome sandpaper against Redford’s factory-finished polish, although even their early sparks are pretty quickly subsumed into more cutely annoying little vignettes.
When it isn’t trying to nudge you in the ribs, A Walk in the Woods has some reliably gorgeous scenery to rely on. And the more earnest talk about lives lived and not-lived does approach certain levels of grace, or at least gives the pair a chance to act like honest human beings for a little while. There are some slightly grating old-boy digressions about women, but for the most part it’s low-key, earnest talk about the dimming of the lights, and how to make meaning when potential is mostly a memory.
If the film strove for half that honesty in its funnier asides, this would be a fine survey of the twilight. Failing that, it could have at least worked harder to get in Bryson’s original trivia about the Appalachian Trail: If we’re going to watch old men bumble through the wilderness, we might at least learn something about the trees.