Robert Redford Made It Look Easy
The late actor’s talent could seem invisible until the right conditions made it heroically apparent.
For a long stretch of its opening act, All the President’s Men—the canonical paranoid thriller from 1976—isn’t just about the brewing Watergate scandal, or about the battle between a cagey political machine and an enterprising newspaper. It’s also about Robert Redford, who died today at the age of 89, at work.
A group of burglars is arrested while attempting a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, and a reporter, Bob Woodward (Redford), gets a call from his editor, who tells him to start asking questions. He begins pestering attorneys, listening in at court hearings, and making phone calls—potential leads; strangers who may know something; names jotted down, circled, and scribbled out haphazardly on his yellow legal pad. He, in contrast to his jittery eventual partner, Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman), is unassuming and discreet. Both are intuitive, masterful reporters, but it’s Woodward who embodies the story that Redford, who bought the rights to Woodward and Bernstein’s book shortly after its publication, wanted to tell from the beginning: about a stalwart citizen’s gradual, painful loss of faith in his country’s institutions.
“He’s a humper!” his editor says when the story goes national and is almost taken out of Woodward’s hands—meaning that he’s a hungry, untested reporter with the inner drive of a private eye, yet every bit the diligent WASP and businesslike Republican that his buttoned-up demeanor and windswept hair imply. All the President’s Men is a journalism movie, not a gritty crime noir, but Redford’s Woodward is as consummately professional as one of the existentialist safe-crackers in a cool, collected Jean-Pierre Melville thriller. Which is to say that All the President’s Men is a movie about process, and Redford, in one of his most enduring and finely tuned screen roles, holds its center—with Hoffman giving human form to that slow, ticking momentum.
One of the toughest and most crucial jobs for an actor is to convince us that they are thinking—that if we peel back the surface of the actorly persona, we’ll find an actual person, a self arising out of some genuine inner core that colors in the lines and mannerisms of a character and makes them real. Despite his immense fame, Redford, one of the defining American actors of both his and subsequent generations, feels almost undercelebrated in this regard. He had a habit of making the job look too easy, and his nuances were often most apparent in contrast to multiple eras of co-stars—A-list actors like Hoffman, Natalie Wood, Paul Newman, Jane Fonda, and Barbra Streisand, then Meryl Streep, Michelle Pfeiffer, and even a fledgling Andrew Garfield—or the setting, like the expansive wilderness of the 1972 western Jeremiah Johnson. Redford’s talent could seem invisible until the right conditions made it heroically apparent. His craft was not predicated on reminding us, through strain and largesse, of a master at work; his mastery could be found in the fact that we so often seemed to miss it.
Redford’s life began all over the place. He was born in California, and often traveled to Texas as a child; he went to Colorado for college (and was kicked out), then spent a brief stint in Europe studying art before he landed in New York with the intention of becoming an artist. Instead he became an actor, a path that—as he described it over the years—was almost accidental.
The career itself was not. Thanks to a fortunate bit of casting, alongside Newman, in a little movie called Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Redford became inseparable from the New Hollywood movement of the 1960s, and mainstream Hollywood after that. He starred in a long series of big-ticket, culturally canonized films—Jeremiah Johnson, the Streisand romance The Way We Were, The Great Gatsby, The Sting, Three Days of the Condor, The Natural, Out of Africa—that leaned as much on his actual chops as on his near-iconographic physical beauty. The Natural is, to the core, a movie that reveres the utter Americana of historical baseball, with its lo-fi Dust Bowl aesthetics that heavily reference Arthurian legend. The movie is really just a showcase for those storied shots of Redford foregrounded in the orange dusk of the Midwest, or lit up by bright stadium lights, gorgeously silhouetted and unabashedly American. It wouldn’t work as well if you couldn’t look at the guy and instantly know who he is and where, in the national mythos, he belongs.
In a 1974 profile titled “Is Redford Just Another Pretty Face?,” The New York Times wrote: “On film, Robert Redford is a splendid sight, one of the best to come along since Marilyn Monroe. Off‐screen, he is rather less spectacular. So was Monroe.” A backhanded evaluation, maybe, but the description of Redford as an “exceedingly but unremarkably good‐looking man with the smile of the consummate gym teacher” was apt—if only because it reminded us that, at least in Redford’s case, a man’s undeniable sex appeal could be as distracting from his talent as a woman’s often was. This is the man who lost out on the lead role in Mike Nichols’s The Graduate because, as Nichols reportedly told him, “You can’t play a loser. Look at you. How many times have you struck out with a woman?”
Redford was only ever nominated for an acting Oscar once in his career, for The Sting. After he turned to directing in 1980, he was nominated twice for Best Director, for Quiz Show and Ordinary People, the latter of which he won. He received an honorary Oscar in 2002—a strange accolade for anyone primarily acquainted with Redford as an actor, but less of an anomaly for the industry at large, where Redford’s extraordinary history of support for filmmakers off-screen was most obviously evidenced by the Sundance Film Festival, which was co-founded by his production company.
But it was his screen presence that the rest of us loved, a charisma that was never sharper than when contrasted with a polar opposite. Think of him in The Way We Were, as the “nice gentile boy” to Streisand’s “nice Jewish girl”: she the brazen socialist who’s given to big feelings and big speeches about politics, he the upper-crust fraternity man with a practical streak. He’s the straitlaced fantasy object to her pulsating, brash, desirous youthfulness. Redford’s skill is in fleshing out the terms of that fantasy, and proving desirable even as their politics and lifestyles wedge them apart. He grounds the character in practical reality without becoming an oversimple political or romantic villain. If Streisand’s head is in the clouds, then he, for a time, is the single strand tethering her back to Earth.
That groundedness was nevertheless rife with surprises. One of Redford’s last screen roles, which presaged his retirement from acting in 2018, was as the career criminal Forrest Tucker in David Lowery’s The Old Man & the Gun. In that movie, he played a bank robber and escaped convict so likable that the people he robbed couldn’t help but report him to the police with smiles on their faces. Tucker was a counterintuitive criminal who was motivated not by money but, even more richly, by the pure, joyous thrill of getting away with something. It was a fitting capstone for an actor who got away with sleights of hand for his entire career, sneaking into our lives and onto our screens with understated grace, and slipped away just as quietly as he came—here one second, gone the next.
