On the road to nowhere
With jokes as creaky as their ageing knees, Redford and Nolte suck the charm out of Bill Bryson’s travel classic
A Walk In The Woods (15)
Verdict: Laboured adventure-comedy
Everest (12A)
Verdict: Heart-stoppingly tense
FIRST, let me lay out my credentials for looking forward to this film, an adaptation of Bill Bryson’s 1998 book about his attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail with the old school friend to whom he gives the pseudonym Stephen Katz. I am a big fan of Bryson’s books, in fact I think I’ve read every word of every one. I’m also an admirer of Robert Redford, who bought the movie rights originally as a vehicle for himself and Paul Newman.
Instead, Nick Nolte plays Katz opposite Redford’s Bryson, thoroughly A-list casting that rather muffled the warning bells I should have heard. For a start, the book’s protagonists were in their 40s when they embarked on their adventure, while Redford is pushing 80, and Nolte a mere 74.
Anyway, in the film, our superannuated version of Bryson has moved to New England after many years living in old England, with an English wife (in reality Cynthia, but here called Catherine, and played by Emma Thompson at her most school-ma’am-y).
He is astonished to find that the famous Appalachian Trail passes right through the woods near their home and decides to have a crack at walking it from its southernmost point in Georgia to its northernmost in Maine, a distance of almost 2,200 miles.
Maybe he just wants to get away from bossy Catherine for five months. Whatever, Bryson must find someone to go with him, eventually alighting (after every other contender has declined) on his raddled friend, Katz, a recovering alcoholic from back home in Iowa. And so Nolte enters, or rather shuffles, into the proceedings, with a face not so much lived in as derelict.
And off they go, two creaky old codgers who plainly, in real life, would not get 500 yards.
Nolte is terrific insofar as he is allowed to be, but what ensues is, cinematically, a mess. It’s all affable enough, but director Ken Kwapis, not helped by Rick Kerb and Bill Holderman’s screenplay, manifestly strains to inject repeated bursts of slapstick, as when our arthritic heroes fall into a mountain stream or see off a pair of grizzly bears.
When poignancy is called for, that misfires, too. At one point, they get stranded on a rocky ledge from which there appears to be no escape (it doesn’t seem to occur to them to climb the 20ft or so back to the trail).
So they settle down to a slow death as if they were contemplating a night in front of the telly.
EXCEPT for Nolte’s portrayal of a grizzled old reprobate, almost nothing in this film seems real, starting with Redford and Thompson as a married couple. Not even the Trail itself, a cinematographer’s gift, is particularly well presented, with one spectacular shot serving, from various angles, every time we are offered a view. I watched in a state of puzzled disappointment, never more than when a bizarre semi-flirtation unfolds between Bryson and a fragrant motel owner (Mary Steenburgen).
In the same small town there’s a more meaningful tryst between Katz and a hefty local he meets in a launderette, which is modestly amusing until you realise that we’re simply being set up for the next piece of unconvincing slapstick, as Bryson and Katz heave themselves out of a window trying to flee the woman’s avenging husband.
Through all this, precisely none of the charm and wit of the real Bryson shines through.
Redford’s character is prissily unsympathetic, and his inability even to cross a highway without suffering a muddy pratfall makes him seem not engagingly hapless, but annoyingly brainless. Moreover,
when he drops into conversation those esoteric facts and statistics in which the books take such delight, he simply sounds like a bore.
It is painfully ironic that the comedy should be so laboured, given how effortlessly it rolls off the page.
The screening I attended was followed by a Q&A with Bryson himself, who was far too diplomatic to hint that he was anything other than delighted, though he did, in his kindly way, admit some bewilderment at the film’s clumsiest running gag, namely that he set off on his epic walk without any intention of chronicling it in a book.
We all know that he only did the walk so he could write a book. And while I wouldn’t want to rob him of the highly unlikely experience of seeing himself incarnated by one of the silver screen’s great male sex symbols, a book is how it should have stayed.
AS UNFAIR as it might be to compare a comic look at the challenges of the Appalachian Trail with a tragic ascent of the world’s highest mountain, the perils of the Great Outdoors are depicted with infinitely greater skill in Everest.
This is a heart- stoppingly tense drama, brilliantly realised in 3D, based on the 1996 disaster that claimed the lives of nine climbers. The cinematography alone is stunning, and the star quotient is impressive too, with Jake Gyllenhaal, Emily Watson and Keira Knightley all in supporting roles.
Knightley, essaying a New Zealand accent, plays the pregnant wife of Rob Hall (Jason Clarke), a rugged Kiwi and one of several entrepreneurs, who, in the Nineties turned the ascent of Everest into a commercial enterprise.
Watson is his trusted colleague, Helen Wilton, who runs the company’s Base Camp operation, while Gyllenhaal plays Scott Fischer, the leader of a rival expedition team, who agrees to join forces with Hall when it becomes clear that there are too many groups aiming ‘to summit’ (in mountaineering jargon, the noun becomes a verb) on the same day.
Like the 1953 expedition that first conquered the world’s highest peak, this film is a British production, the writing credits shared by Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire) and William Nicholson (Gladiator).
The director, though, is Icelandic: Baltasar Kormakur. He does a marvellous job.
Often, even in good films about climbing, you can sense the wind machine just off camera. Not here. Even with the odd Dolomite standing in, not to mention a stage at Pinewood Studios, the elemental majesty and indeed cruelty of Everest is superbly evoked.
Moreover, just as it used to be said of Ginger Rogers that she could do everything that Fred Astaire could do, only backwards, so enormous credit is due to the camera team who crossed the ravines and crevasses too, only backwards.
As for the story, it is largely one of bad luck, bad weather and bad judgment, all combined with acts of jawdropping heroism as well as the almost unhinged willingness that some people have to put their own lives, and the lives of others, in mortal danger just to satisfy a craving.
In short, it is a story both of human strength and frailty, and splendidly acted (with Knightley turning in a small but genuinely affecting performance).
The film’s stand-out star, however, is right there in the title.