In addition to being an actor, activist, and philanthropist, Robert Redford also founded a filmmaking institute and a subsequent film festival with a name culled from one of his most famous characters, Sundance, that became a shorthand for a whole American independent movie movement. That was a movement I essentially grew up on in the 90s when I was first becoming a movie fan. Just a couple weeks ago, in fact, I watched Tim Blake Nelson’s “Eye of God” for the first time, released in 1997, and which Nelson adapted from his own stage play at the Sundance Institute’s Screenwriters and Directors Lab. Ryan Coogler, who might well have made 2025’s best movie in “Sinners,” emerged from the Sundance Institute too. That’s what helped make Redford a true icon, worthy of veneration. He wasn’t just an artist; he created a historically significant space to help artists, to foster artistry itself. Do you put that first in the obituary now that he’s dead at age 89? I guess I just did.
With that alliterative name, so poetically plainspoken, it might sound like Robert Redford was born a star, but Charles Robert Redford Jr. took a long, winding path on account of a difficult and hell-raising youth. A college dropout, he was an extremely studious person who just didn’t like to study in a classroom, which is about the only thing I can say the two of us had in common. After roaming Europe, he enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Art. And though he began as a working actor on stage and television, the big screen truly illuminated his style. “I could do it,” he told The New Yorker’s Richard Rayner in 1998. “And I knew I could do it better than a lot of people. And I don’t know why.” There’s the famous anecdote Mike Nichols told of Redford not getting the lead in “The Graduate” because he didn’t understand what it meant to not get the girl in the end, and I wonder if that also illustrates him not understanding why he could do what others couldn’t. “He seemed to glow gold,” Stephanie Zacharek once wrote to describe Redford’s beauty and as Manohla Dargis noted in appraising Redford after his death, there is a “confidence that is specific to beauty: (he) never had to fight for your attention.”
That might be true and speaks to why he was an actor who never really cut loose, but he knew how to win your attention, nevertheless. He cultivated a distinct air on screen, one of immense restraint, and then calibrated that air in coordination with the character he was playing. If at first glance it might appear that he was just being himself, in so far as his screen persona represented “himself,” it belied the oozing nuance underneath, and suggests why despite being good in movie-movies like “The Sting,” he was best with some meat on the bone. In “All the President’s Men” his calm exterior belied the fast-thinking interior; in “The Candidate” his charming exterior belied a deliberate interior of nothing at all; in maybe my favorite Redford movie “Downhill Racer” he subversively turned his golden features against themselves in a bracingly unsentimental performance as an arrogant, self-absorbed professional skier who puts himself on a pedestal. “Downhill Racer” concluded on a freeze-frame redressing every sports movie freeze-frame ever as so much hooey, but it also epitomized the power of the camera to mold an image. Redford knew that restraint maximized the camera’s power.
Redford demonstrated that restraint in virtually all aspects. He fiercely guarded his private life and despite being one of its biggest stars, maintained a healthy skepticism of Hollywood. He won his Oscar for directing “Ordinary People” in 1980, but it was 1994’s “Quiz Show” where he really made his mark behind the camera, unmasking institutional myths in a way that no doubt felt close to home. In the new century, he did not shun the spotlight, exactly, but receded from it, acting less and less, content to stick to his home in Utah and build Sundance. It’s why even if his final film, “The Old Man and the Gun,” ultimately felt appropriate in its reckoning with time, his late period film I most liked was “All Is Lost” in which he played a nameless man all by himself adrift at sea. Redford has next to no dialogue, and his character has virtually no backstory, save for a few lines in voiceover hinting at the mess he made of things in his personal life. And though that’s typically a red flag, in this case it works, like a moment when the nameless man eats from a can of beans, one Redford improbably invests with so much searching melancholy.
That can of beans makes me me think of John Saward’s Flaming Hydra piece about Gene Hackman when Redford’s “Downhill Racer” co-star died earlier this year. Saward focused on an image that proliferated the Internet of the elderly Hackman enjoying a cup of coffee and individually wrapped apple pie by himself to convey that after a lifetime of chasing desires and hungers and making messes in the pursuit, your wants and needs are eventually pared down to nothing more, really, than a coffee and a pie. Hackman, as Saward noted in referencing an interview with the actor, didn’t even know where his Oscars were. “You tumble around for years trying to understand yourself, starting fights, seething on four hours’ sleep; you get into debt and out of it and hit some wild jackpots,” Saward wrote. “You get the big house and all the stuff to fill it with, and in the end you try to get rid of it all. There’s a sturdy logic to this. How many different outfits do you need to go get a cup of coffee?” And in its unlikely way, “All Is Lost” brings that sentiment to life over the course of an hour and forty-six minutes as Redford’s man sees his sailboat maimed, transfers to a life raft with what little he can manage, eventually losing even that, and the raft too, shedding everything until all that’s left is whatever awaits all of us next.