If you want to talk about the waste of natural resources, A Walk in the Woods is a good place to start. Four capable actors – Robert Redford, Nick Nolte, Emma Thompson and Mary Steenburgen – are hung out to dry in a movie so clueless and so ignorant of its world that it's still making fun of fat women and acting as if discovering oneself on a long hike is a new idea for a movie.
Bill Bryson (Robert Redford), a writer, needs to shake up his life, so he decides to walk the Appalachian Train from Georgia to Maine. Apparently the people who made the picture don't know of either Wild, the cloying City Slickers, or a dozen other movies about finding oneself outdoors.
Bill's wife (Emma Thompson) won't let him go on this foolish excursion alone, but the only person he can round up is Stephen Katz (Nick Nolte), a growly old slob Bill knew years ago. Katz must have found his clothes in a dumpster, while Bryson looks like an ad for L.L. Bean. And the old jokes keep coming – Bryson sets up his 40-year-old pup tent – and, imagine, it falls down. When two tents talk to each other, you despair for the state of the movies.
So off Bill and Stephen go, the exhausted story of one neat and one messy. You can guess what adventures befall the two men. The existential moment of crisis comes when together the two roll off the trail to a ledge. It's a drop of a few feet, but they act as if they've tumbled down Denali, and then come morning they're amazed that other people actually come by – this on a trail with a constant flow of hikers.
The mainstream film business in America has no idea how to show anyone over about 35.
Older characters are either dying or losing their memory. If they're lucky, they just slide into empty irrelevance, all of it awash in pathetic sentimentality. What they don't have are anything like rich or complex lives, and so these two babes in the woods are left to be banal and cute. They have nothing to rediscover because they have no lives to begin with.
Whatever discontent Bryson may feel is invisible to us. There's no texture or substance with his wife; she's just a minor obstacle to his upcoming hike. Stephen simply has no life at all. On a break in a small town, a comely woman (Mary Steenburgen) gives Redford the eye, but that's it – no flirt, no struggle with his conscience, no hint of desire. So, no drama and no story.
A Walk in the Woods looks like it comes out of those screenwriting manuals with instructions for empty formulas but no actual stuff. The fine cinematographer John Bailey, doesn't even get the chance to make the Appalachian Trail look inviting. He's stuck with ancient painful clichés that make you wonder how he and the others fell into such a quicksand of a movie.
You have to wonder how this movie got made in the first place. Something must have happened along the way, because you can't imagine that all of these experienced, talented people got hoodwinked, or need work this badly.
Redford looks like he's embarrassed to be there, babbling his strings of ridiculous, pretentious observations. Redford himself has been on actual hikes, and must be doubly ashamed. Wild, the film with Reese Witherspoon taking a long hike on the West Coast, may be pretentious and obvious, but at least something happens. It's a monument of cinema compared to A Walk in the Woods. What were these people thinking?
At the end, Bryson begins to write a new book. It's called A Walk in the Woods. Oy. Just hope you don't have to read it.
