\n<\/p>\n
Robert Redford ruled the golden-boy category, whether he was twirling a Colt revolver or directing a camera\u2019s glance. He sure looked like one of life\u2019s winners. As others have pointed out in their remembrances of the actor and director, he was a \u201cquintessential leading man\u201d who possessed \u201cnear-iconographic physical beauty.\u201d But the sheen was slippery, as he was well aware. His decades of work contain a theme so pronounced that once you notice it, you see it everywhere in his films: the hollowness of an easy victory.<\/p>\n
In so many of his roles, Redford played an athlete or an outdoorsman. Start counting with The Natural<\/em> and the list expands to include his collegiate romancer in The Way We Were<\/em>, the opening credits of which include him credibly hurling a javelin, rowing crew, and breaking the tape in a sprint. Even his lethally still, laconic gunfighter in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid <\/em>has all the jaunty arrogance of a great athlete, once he takes his thumbs out of his slouch-hipped belt. \u201cNice-looking piece,\u201d the reedy-voiced Strother Martin says, and asks dismissively, \u201cCan you hit anything?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSometimes,\u201d the Kid answers.<\/p>\n Told to skip fancy gunplay and just shoot at a target, he misses by a foot. Martin spits contemptuously and starts to walk away. Without a twitch of his handlebar \u2019stache, Kid says:<\/p>\n \u201cCan I move?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMove? What the hell you mean, move?\u201d<\/p>\n With a drop to one knee and a rapid blam<\/em>–blam<\/em>, he dances the target across the dirt, and then rises and delivers that immortal reply:<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m better when I move.\u201d<\/p>\n In Little Fauss and Big Halsy<\/em>, he\u2019s a pro dirt biker. In The Great Waldo Pepper<\/em>, a stunt flyer. In The Electric Horseman<\/em>, a commercially soured rodeo cowboy. A backpacker in A Walk in the Woods<\/em>, a solo sailor in All Is Lost<\/em>, in which he carries an entire film with hardly a word. A mountain man in Jeremiah Johnson,<\/em> a safari hunter in Out of Africa<\/em>, a trainer in The Horse Whisperer<\/em>, and of course, a lefty ballplayer in The Natural<\/em>. In all of them, Redford does much of his own riding, wing walking, throwing, catching, and hitting. More important, in most of them the character eclipses the actor. Hubbell Gardiner lives.<\/p>\n His con man \/ card shark \/ grifter Johnny Hooker in The Sting<\/em> makes simply eating with a fork in a diner look deft, idiosyncratically so. But\u2014and this is significant in naming Redford\u2019s staying power, in why he\u2019ll have such an intelligent and meaningful legacy\u2014all of these characters are a little too<\/em> deft for their own good, and didn\u2019t Redford know it, and play it. \u201cIf you\u2019re in a position of being viewed iconically, you\u2019d better have a mechanism to take yourself down to keep the balance,\u201d he once wrote in Time<\/em> magazine.<\/p>\n For me, Redford\u2019s masterpiece is 1969\u2019s Downhill Racer<\/em>, his first foray into independent filmmaking. Though it was directed by Michael Ritchie, the project was driven by Redford, who was its central character and governing sensibility. He was determined that it be an authentic rendering of the perils of unbraked competition. It\u2019s a film about, as so very many of his works would turn out to be, \u201cPyrrhic victory,\u201d as he said years later.<\/p>\n Downhill Racing <\/em>remains, for my money, the most truthful sports film ever made. (Confession: I may be partial to it because of a personal connection. Redford researched his role by following the 1968 U.S. Olympic ski team across the most harrowing slopes of Europe, partly in the company of a writer from Sports Illustrated<\/em> named Dan Jenkins, my father.) Redford\u2019s portrayal of David Chappellet is as revealing as an X-ray: He captures the great athlete\u2019s boredom with mundanity, the self-centeredness of his pursuit, the bravado required by the terrifying exposure of an unarmored body speeding down the steeps, skis clattering over ice\u2014and the sudden silence when a man goes airborne, off balance.<\/p>\n Redford in Downhill Racer<\/em>. (Film Publicity Archive \/ United Archives \/ Getty)<\/p>\n Redford\u2019s insight into elite sport, as he remarked during a promotional tour in 1970, was that \u201cfrequently it fits you only for the wrong things, even breaks you utterly.\u201d Winning, and its attendant praise, in Downhill Racer<\/em>\u2019s telling, lasts about a minute. Then it begins to corrupt, a truth rendered in the final scene, when Chappellet briefly catches the eye of the young Austrian racer who was beating him until the Austrian crashed. Chappellet\u2019s jolt of self-awareness, that he just as easily could have lost if the Austrian hadn\u2019t caught an edge, is immediately overwhelmed by a congratulating crowd. At the final frame, you can already feel the inevitable toll coming, the day when he will be defeated, just another limping veteran.<\/p>\n Redford tells this story time and time again in his films, even the most unsporting. The Candidate<\/em>? It\u2019s about a race\u2014and the final three minutes are among Redford\u2019s finest, as he plays the newly elected Senator Bill McKay\u2019s aghast awakening from mindless competitiveness: \u201cWhat do we do now?\u201d Ordinary People<\/em>, which he directed, is an excruciating essay about a sporty boating-and-golfing couple who imagine themselves securely among life\u2019s winners but prove incapable of dealing with real crisis. A River Runs Through It<\/em>\u2014a film I\u2019ve seen possibly 10 times, and never without being wholly absorbed by the loveliness of its frames and of Redford\u2019s poetic narration\u2014focuses on a handsome athlete-fisherman, played by Brad Pitt, whose ease duels with recklessness. Quiz Show <\/em>is about nothing if not how the hagiography that attaches to a \u201cwinner\u201d can twist the most benign-seeming men. \u201cWhat was I supposed to do at that point, disillusion the whole goddamn country?\u201d Charles Van Doren asks in an effort to excuse his cheating.<\/p>\n Redford\u2019s distrust of winners came from firsthand experience as an athlete, and stardom only deepened it. He was apparently something of a phenom growing up on the poor side of Van Nuys, a multisporter who said he played American Legion baseball, and a strong enough junior-tennis player to warm up the great Pancho Gonzales at the Los Angeles Tennis Club. But he became so disenchanted by the striving that he got kicked out of school and went off to Europe to paint, and then to New York to act.<\/p>\n He told a 2014 forum at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, \u201cOne of the themes that I\u2019ve tried to work in films is the subject of winning, that this is a country that\u2019s all about winning.\u201d He continued, \u201cI was told a slogan as a kid when I was playing baseball: Listen, it doesn\u2019t matter whether you win or lose, it\u2019s how you play the game. That\u2019s what\u2019s important, and that was drummed into my head and drummed into my head. Yet, what I experienced was just the opposite. What I experienced was winning was everything. So, I think that sunk so deep into my psyche that when I became able, years later, to be an artist or to make film, I wanted to tell the truth about my country that wasn\u2019t being told.\u201d<\/p>\n Redford\u2019s lifelong theme was perhaps best distilled in a line from the 2000 golf fable The Legend of Bagger Vance, <\/em>which he directed: \u201cWhat I\u2019m talkin\u2019 about is a game, a game that can\u2019t be won, only played.\u201d<\/p>\n Art is a game that cannot be won, only played. \u201cI try to convey to the artists that success has to be handled gingerly,\u201d Redford once said. \u201cYou want to shadowbox with it; you don\u2019t want to really engage with success until you find a way to engineer it so that you don\u2019t wind up being its slave.\u201d<\/p>\n To Redford, winning was a dangerous deception, as perilous to the heart as equating gorgeousness with character. \u201cAll good things\u2014trout as well as eternal salvation\u2014came by grace; and grace comes by art; and art does not come easy,\u201d Norman Maclean wrote in A River Runs Through It<\/em>, a book Redford clearly revered. Redford\u2019s work includes real triumph, but it\u2019s the triumph of an artist whose substance was slow-won, stroke by stroke, block by block, until he turned himself into a truly beautiful man.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Robert Redford ruled the golden-boy category, whether he was twirling a Colt revolver or directing a camera\u2019s glance. He sure looked like one of life\u2019s winners. As others have pointed out in their remembrances of the actor and director, he was a \u201cquintessential leading man\u201d who possessed \u201cnear-iconographic physical beauty.\u201d But the sheen was slippery,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22655,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[13897,591,13304,2324,4657],"class_list":{"0":"post-22654","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-corrupts","9":"tag-knew","10":"tag-redford","11":"tag-robert","12":"tag-winning"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22654"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22654\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/22655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}