Lower your expectations and just enjoy this stroll
A Walk in the Woods
(out of 4) Starring Robert Redford, Nick Nolte, Emma Thompson and Kristen Schaal. Directed by Ken Kwapis. Now playing at GTA theatres. 104 minutes. 14A Wild meets The Bucket List when Robert Redford and Nick Nolte go for A Walk in the Woods, and that’s about as profound as this fun pairing gets.
This may sound like damning with faint praise, but it’s intended more as a suggestion to lower expectations and just enjoy the stroll — the one known as the Appalachian Trail, stretching more than 3,400 kilometres from Georgia to Maine.
Leave the heavier thoughts to Bill Bryson, author of the 1998 bestseller of the same name that the movie is drawn from. (Rick Kerb and Bill Holderman share screenplay credits, Big Miracle’s Ken Kwapis directs.)
Redford plays Bryson, who at first screen meeting is suffering from an excess of success. He’s the author of profitable travel books and married to the beautiful and charming Cath- erine (Emma Thompson), but he seems bored with life itself.
“Writers don’t retire,” he gruffly tells a TV interviewer. “We either drink ourselves to death or blow our brains out.”
In a bid to stave off either unhappy event, Bryson hits upon the idea of walking the Appalachian Trail, a heavily wooded path known for defeating its challengers, including many who are considerably younger than him.
Despite entreaties by family members that he’s too old and the trail is too dangerous, Bryson holds firm: “I want to push myself.” Catherine insists he at least find a companion for the trek.
After several frustrating (albeit humorous) attempts to conscript close buddies to join him, Bryson gets a call from a voice out of the past: Stephen Katz (Nolte), whom he had a falling out with some 40 years ago.
For reasons neither man can completely fathom, the gruff Katz is eager to let bygone be bygones and do the stroll with Bryson, even though Katz is far from being in top form.
He’s overweight, with one trick knee and the other made of titanium, and he suffers from seizures. Bryson is in far better shape, but he hasn’t done any hiking for some 30 years.
This isn’t too far removed from real life: Redford is a very fit 79, Nolte a not-so-fit 74. (It’s worth nothing that the real Bryson and Katz were both 44 when they toured the Appalachian Trail.)
The walk is on, along with all the expected geriatric jokes and grumps plus encounters with eccentric humans (Kristen Schaal and Mary Steenburgen oblige) and wild animals (bears). There’s some fantastic scenery, too.
The two actors carp and quip well together, enough to carry us through a plot with few surprises. It’s almost enough to make us forget that this was originally a project of high expectations.
Redford, also one of the film’s producers, originally planned A Walk in the Woods as his long-desired screen reunion with Paul Newman, following on their previous teaming for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting.
Newman’s death in 2008 scotched that plan, but Nolte makes for an appealing substitute.