A River Runs Through It *** (1992, Brad Pitt, Craig Sheffer, Tom Skerritt, Brenda Blethyn) – Classic Movie Review 3244

Ah yes, a movie about fly fishing! Brad Pitt and Craig Sheffer star in producer-director Robert Redford’s high, wide and handsome 1992 tale of two brothers – one rebellious and the other reserved – growing up in rural Montana with their church family. The movie comes complete with Tom Skerritt and Brenda Blethyn as the lads’ parents.

Unfortunately, beautifully crafted and acted as it is, it moves like a slow-moving, grand and stately river with an Oscar-nominated screenplay by Richard Friedenberg that has a doldrum-flowing chasm running through it. There’s just no compelling force or energy in the screenplay, leaving the director and his actors to work desperately hard and over-diligently to fill the huge, wide-open spaces.

Though he’s not obvious casting, Skerritt makes an excellent job of the role of stern minister father, while Pitt (looking uncannily like the young Redford) makes a charmingly roguish journalist younger son, all teeth and smiles and deception. But nobody else makes much of a real impression, not Craig Sheffer as Pitt’s older brother and certainly not Emily Lloyd as Sheffer’s girlfriend.

There’s a pleased-with-itself self-importance about this film, with Redford’s voice over narration, the spouting of poetry* (see below), the continual amazement at the wonders of nature (oh my gosh, a mountain! – oh my goodness, a river!) that makes it often very dull. It takes itself far too seriously and there is little action, drama or humour to liven it up.

But some of Friedenberg’s dialogue is involving, and the movie does really look a treat thanks to that amazing scenery and Philippe Rousselot’s Oscar-winning cinematography. It is filmed in and around Livingston, Bozeman and Big Timber, Montana, with many of the fishing scenes shot in the Gallatin Canyon on the Gallatin River south of Bozeman. And Mark Isham’s Oscar-nominated score also helps lift the spirits quite a bit. It replaced Elmer Bernstein’s original score, which Redford rejected.

A final credit reads: ‘No fish were harmed in the making of this film’! It seems funny but of course here it’s serious.

Also in the cast are Edie McClurg, Stephen Shellen, Vann Gravage, Nicole Burdettte, Susan Taylor and a very young Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

The semi-autobiographical story, such as it is, is by Norman Maclean. No wonder it was rejected by all the large commercial publishers he sent it to, including one that rejected it because it contained ‘too many trees’. However it was finally published by the University of Chicago Press in 1976, sold well and captured the imagination of Redford, who courted the author for years to get the movie rights.

Redford was Golden Globe nominated as Best Director.

Pitt trained fly fishing for four weeks – mostly on top of a building as he was in Los Angeles!

*Maclean and his father recite an excerpt from William Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3244

Link to Derek Winnert’s home page for more reviews: http://derekwinnert.com/