Robert Redford plays an aging thief

The Old Man & the Gun creaks along in predictable fashion, but Redford displays wary charm.

There's one compelling reason to see The Old Man & the Gun. The movie stars Robert Redford who says that his performance as real-life bank robber Forrest Tucker is his last. Now 82, Redford has told interviewers that he plans to devote his time to directing and environmental causes. He's also still the driving force behind The Sundance Film Festival.

When I say that Redford provides the only reason to see The Old Man & the Gun, it's because he creates a reliably agreeable portrait of a thief who devotes his life either to holding up banks or escaping from prison, a feat he accomplished 16 times.

Full of wary charm, Redford's portrayal of Tucker arrives sans all traces of malice or evil.

I don't know if that makes sense for the subject matter, but Redford's fans should be able to regard this performance as a pleasing valedictory to great career.

Director David Lowery (Ghost Story), who wrote the screenplay based on a New Yorker article by David Grann, builds Redford's character around a single, disarming trait: Tucker is ultra polite and friendly during his robberies. The people he holds up (bank managers and tellers) all seem to take away positive impressions of this grand larcenist.

The rest of the cast includes Danny Glover and Tom Waits as a couple of Tucker's accomplices.
Sissy Spacek plays a widow who is charmed by Tucker, although she's not ready to abandon her life for him.

I suppose every robber needs a nemesis. In this case, the job goes to Casey Affleck, who appeared in Ghost Story. Affleck portrays Texas detective John Hunt, a man who made it his business to track Tucker.

Despite some nice scenes between Spacek and Redford, The Old Man & the Gun feels like a slightly creaky version of a movie we've seen before. And if this is Redford's last movie, I wish he had been chosen something a bit more challenging.

I feel guilty saying that because Redford certainly has earned the right to do whatever he wants; for me, he's been an exciting screen presence since I first saw him in movies such as Inside Daisy Glover (1964) and The Chase (1966).

I hope, at a minimum, that Redford doesn't give up on directing because a movie world without Robert Redford in it seems like a very bad idea.

'Truth' looks at big-time TV news

Kate Blanchett and Robert Redford star in a drama about the story that took down anchorman Dan Rather.

Truth, the story of how a team of crack 60 Minutes' reporters got misled while doing a 2004 story about George W. Bush's military record, tries to mount what might be the most high-minded defense of journalistic misjudgment ever.

The real-life story resulted in resignations and firings, including the abdication of Dan Rather from the anchor throne of the CBS Evening News. Rather also had to issue an on-air apology.

In Truth, absorption with the details of researching the story ultimately gives way to a lamentation over a once honorable news business that has been swallowed by self-serving corporate concerns.

Look, I'm as happy as the next former ink stained wretch to cry in my beer over the sorry state of contemporary journalism, but Truth may not have found the right story to make the case.

For those who've forgotten, the CBS story revolved around two central contentions.

One: During the Vietnam War years, influence was used to get the privileged Bush into the Texas Air National Guard, presumably as a way to avoid combat. Two: Bush didn't fulfill a substantial portion of his Guard commitment.

That's a good story to be sure, particularly in a year when Bush was running for his second term, but significant doubt was cast on the authenticity of two documents Mapes and company relied on to prove make their argument.

Truth, which stars Cate Blanchett as Mary Mapes and Robert Redford as Dan Rather, suggests that a few missteps along the way didn't necessarily undermine the story's essential veracity. That may be true, but it's not a position I'd want to argue in the court of journalistic ethics.

Redford, who starred in All the President's Men, a 1976 story about the journalistic triumphs of Watergate, again takes up the cudgels for a probing press. But even in a story of involving mistakes, Rather is made to embody a heightened form of journalistic virtue.

A pair of suspenders can't turn Redford into Rather. Still, he gives a decent enough performance as a guy who's been around the journalistic block.

Rather may be the big name in the story, but Truth focuses most of its attention on Mary Mapes, the gifted producer who led the team of reporters who researched the story before the heavy interviewing artillery -- i.e., Rather -- arrived.

Blanchett's certainly good at showing how the satisfactions of a job well done are undermined once Mapes learns that the story she thought was meticulously researched began to fall apart.

Dennis Quaid, Topher Grace and Elisabeth Moss hold their own as members of the reporting team. Bruce Greenwood, David Lyons and Rachel Blake add flavor as CBS news division execs.

Obviously, the reporting team worked hard on the story, and Rather had ample reason to have confidence in Mapes, who won acclaim and, later, a Peabody, for her work on the infamous Abu Ghraib story. (The movie, in an obvious irony, points out that Mapes won her Peabody after she'd been fired by CBS.)

So what we ultimately get feels a bit addled, a movie that mourns the demise of hard-nosed journalism, but focuses on a case in which the reporters very well may have been suckered.

Vanderbilt concludes with outraged flourishes over they way a major corporation treated reporters with a fighting spirit and a willingness to keep asking tough questions.

Sure CBS was concerned about revenue, its image and possible government retaliation. Maybe the network put its interests above a pursuit of the truth, but that doesn't mean the story that set off this firestorm wasn't flawed.

It's hardly surprising that things ultimately got ugly at CBS. When a network has to fall on its sword, you can bet that blood will be shed, and -- in the case of the Bush story -- some of it belonged to journalists who sincerely thought they had uncovered something big.

Perhaps they did, but the country since has moved on from a story whose greatest impact was felt by those who reported it.

This 'Walk,' hobbled by low-grade material

Robert Redford and Nick Nolte search for laughs on the Appalachian trail.

One of them is a trim 79-year-old whose still-spry voice and white teeth don't seem to have aged at the same pace as his weathered face. The other is a 74-year-old who seems to have aged to the point where his face and body stand as a harsh rebuke to every trace of youthful grace.

I'm talking about Robert Redford and Nick Nolte, the unlikely pair of actors who try out their version of a Grumpy Old Men routine in A Walk on the Woods, a comedy in which an aging travel writer decides to take a re-invigorating 2,118 mile hike on the Appalachian Trail.

When Redford's Bill Bryson can't find a partner to join his adventure, he settles for the company of Nolte's Steve Katz, an alcoholic who only recently put aside the bottle. As young revelers, Bryson and Katz once traveled in Europe together.

The duo long-ago parted company. Katz continued his dissolute life in Iowa. Bryson stayed in England where he met and married a nurse (Emma Thompson). The couple now lives in New Hampshire, where Bryson tries to avoid funerals, treats the world with cynical indifference and occasionally writes a forward for someone else's book.

At one point, Bryson's wife suggests that he talk to people.

Bryson says he doesn't like to talk to people, an unlikely trait for a supposedly great travel writer and an indication of missteps to come.

Under the uninspired direction of Ken Kwapis (He's Just Not Into You and License to Wed), Walk in the Woods turns into a broadly conceived comedy that wanders a long way from the kind of chemistry generated by Redford and Newman in movies such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1968) and The Sting (1973).

I can't imagine what Walk in the Woods would have been had Newman lived long enough to play opposite Redford again, and I'm glad that I can't. I really don't want to think about it.

Beyond that, I'm a little surprised that Redford, who served as one of the movie's producers, was attracted to material that required him to cover himself with mud, fall into a rushing stream and tumble over a cliff that brings him and his slovenly partner to the brink of a death defying leap which -- unlike Butch Cassidy and Sundance -- Bryson and Katz wisely avoid.

Even though Nolte's voice has devolved into a cross between a garbage compactor and a growl and Redford's chops don't necessarily stretch toward the movie's occasional displays of physical comedy, both actors know how to handled themselves on screen. Still, they can't overcome a trail of second-rate material that -- like the Appalachian -- could stretch from Georgia to Maine.

The movie's more serious moments -- Bryson and Katz sharing thoughts on what their lives have meant -- feel worn out. Every now and again, Bryson stops the story in its tracks to deliver a small lecture on the fate of disappearing varieties of trees or the staggering multiplicity of stars in the heavens.

Aside from a few brief appearances by other actors, A Walk in the Woods remains a two-hander. Kristen Schaal plays a female hiker whose presence grates on Bryson and Katz's nerves, and ours, too. Mary Steenburgen brings her luminous smile to the role of a motel owner who flirts with Bryson.

A jokey bit about an overweight woman who becomes the object of Katz's lascivious desires takes on an ill-fitting antic quality.

At times, A Walk in the Woods seems like a goofy east coast version of Wild, the movie in which Reese Witherspoon played a woman who took a solo hike on the Pacific Crest Trail.

In some respects, A Walk in the Woods could have taken its title by going in the opposite direction from Wild. This one is harmless, and that's a shame for Redford and Nolte, both of whom are capable of better.

Another helping of 'Captain America'

The Winter Soldier adds a bit of grown-up flavor.

Let's start with the conclusion: Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a mostly welcome addition to the apparently endless stream of movies derived from Marvel Comics.

Winter Soldier, which follows 2011's The First Avenger, boasts abundant action, some amazingly vertiginous special-effects sequences and a conspiratorial plot that gives this massive comic-book movie a bit of an adult tilt.

Fans already know that a buffed Chris Evans makes a stalwart Captain America, the clean-cut World War II soldier transported into superhero status in the present.

As one-time KGB agent Natasha Romanoff -- a.k.a. Black Widow -- Scarlett Johansson breathes additional life into the proceedings. Same goes for Anthony Mackie, who plays Falcon, a veteran of recent wars who flies with pop-up metal wings. More importantly, Falcon recommends that Captain America familiarize himself with the music of Marvin Gaye.

More about that later.

Samuel Jackson does reliable duty as Nick Fury, the head of S.H.I.E.L.D., the spy agency that uses its real-world savvy to keep America safe.

Directors Anthony and Joe Russo -- known for TV's Arrested Development -- handle the major action set pieces well, giving them body-slam impact: The finale -- though typically protracted -- doesn't skimp on thrills.

Others have made this point, but it's worth reinforcing: Over-editing can ruin fight sequences by substituting frenzied cutting for a clear view of the combat, a sin Winter Soldier too often commits.

Some scenes, though, are more driven by dialogue than CGI, which brings us to Robert Redford, who appears as Alexander Price, a S.H.I.E.L.D. official so virtuous he once turned down the Nobel Peace Prize. Price also heads the World Security Council, a group devoted to maintaining global security.

Can we let Winter Soldier pass without at least wondering about Redford's presence? What exactly is the man behind the Sundance Film Festival, which each year supports the independent spirit in film, doing in a mega-budget, comic-book blockbuster?

I leave it to Redford to answer the question, which is provocation enough for the moment. Maybe he just wanted to play against his image as a liberal savior.

The screenplay tries for complexity by creating confusion about the motivations of Price and Nick Fury, but Winter Soldier isn't exactly over-flowing with edge-of-the-seat suspense.

And, of course, there's the Winter Soldier of the title, an unstoppable warrior played by Sebastian Stan. Not surprisingly, the Winter Soldier is employed by HYDRA, the organization that opposes S.H.I.E.LD. and which happily would sacrifice human lives to maintain order.

But back to Marvin Gaye.

I don't know if the late Gaye ever imagined that his music would find its way into a comic-book movie, but can there be any doubt that the world would be a better place if all comic-book heroes spent more time listening to Gaye and less time kicking butt?

At sea with Robert Redford

Can resourcefulness conquer bad luck in All Is Lost?

After this year's festival season kicked off over Labor Day weekend in Telluride, it became increasingly apparent that Robert Redford was en route to a praise-filled fall. Redford, an actor who hardly needs a career boost, stars in director J.C. Chandor's All Is Lost, the story of a self-sufficient man who runs out of resources when the hull of his sailboat is punctured by a stray cargo container loaded with sneakers, trivial cast-offs from a voracious commercial society.

All Is Lost -- a film featuring almost no dialogue -- showcases Redford's ability to play a character who's forced to determine how to deal with impending disaster. The character -- unnamed in the movie and known in the credits only as Our Man -- improvises a series of life-saving tasks that begin with patching the hole in his yacht.

Ultimately, he must determine how (without a radio, cell phone or other equipment that has been wiped out by flooding) he's going to make his way toward a shipping lane where he might be sighted by a passing vessel.

The movie's brief prologue establishes enough of a backstory to give All Is Lost an allegorical aftertaste. We hear our man reading a note that no one else may ever see. He apologizes -- presumably to his family -- for badly over-estimating how much of the Indian Ocean he could navigate by himself. He's failed, and, this time, his failure might be irredeemable.

Our Man is an independent fellow of obvious means (who else has a sailboat and the time to sail it?), and, if there's a larger thematic point to this seaborne fable, it probably revolves around the ways in which the screenplay methodically deprives Our Man -- perhaps he should be seen as a floating ego -- of every possible support. When there's nothing material left to keep him afloat does anything else remain? Is this the story of an adventure gone wrong or a chronicle about the death knell of male movie stars?

Credibility is mildly disturbed by the fact that Our Man seems to find time to shave everyday, although we only see him shaving once. It also seemed to me that even the most self-possessed of men eventually would start talking to themselves, a la Tom Hanks in Cast Away or Piscine Patel in Life of Pi.

Worse yet, Alex Ebert's distracting score should have been scrapped; the movie is most effective when it's making use of the natural sounds created by the ocean, the foundering ship and the occasional storms that beset it.

Although it never comes up in the film, I wondered about calling the main character "Our Man." Unless there's irony intended, the guy we meet in this voyage isn't a character easily linked to everyone's delusions about self-sufficiency in the face of mortality.

We all may be victims of the kind of self-deception that tells us that we know how to make our way through the perilous storms and yawning vastness each of us eventually confronts. But the guy in this film isn't Our Man. He's a member of a privileged class in which few of us claim membership.

You might argue that this makes his plight (and the movie's point) all the more poignant. Even the most skilled and most affluent among us can't protect themselves from the vicissitudes of fate and from the potentially lethal flotsam of a supremely careless society.

But I watched Redford's character from the outside. All Is Lost isn't a movie of high identification, but of studied observation.

Still, it takes plenty of directorial and acting skill to keep us involved in a one-character drama -- especially if that drama is taking place on a 39-foot yacht, where a lone man faces extinction.

For his part, Chandor has taken a totally opposite direction from his talky but effective debut, Margin Call. And you have to credit both Chandor and Redford with doing what we critics always seem to be insisting on: Trying something new and a little daring.

I leave it to you to decide whether All Is Lost should be seen as a stripped-down story with universal applications or a cinematic curiosity that's notable mostly for bobbing bravely on a sea that's otherwise cluttered with escapist junk.

A real cowboy's inspiring story

MEET BUCK BRANNAMAN. YOU'LL BE GLAD YOU DID.

Child abuse seems to be passed from one generation to the next, so when we're confronted with an exception to the rule, it's worth trying to figure out what turned the tide. You can think about such matters while watching Buck, an inspiring documentary about a cowboy who employs a kinder, gentler way of training horses.

Buck Brannaman, a 49-year-old trainer who advised Robert Redford during the filming of The Horse Whisperer and who conducts horse-training clinics throughout the country, was abused as a child. Buck's dad turned his sons (Buck has an older brother) into trick ropers; they were cute and good, but that didn't stop their father from beating them senseless.

Despite his troubled upbringing, Buck avoided repeating the sins of his father. I think that's because a high school coach and a local sheriff intervened: Buck and his brother were placed on a sprawling Montana ranch. There, Buck became part of a large foster family headed by Forest and Betsy Shirley. Forrest, a strong father figure, kept his charges busy. Betsy, a woman of irrepressible spirit, filled the mother role. Buck, whose own mother died when he was 11, still refers to Betsy as his mom.

Buck is married and has two daughters, but remains a bit of a loner, traveling the country to conduct training sessions. His methods -- based on trying to identify with and understand an animal's fear -- have enabled him to work with both horses and owners, and to hear Buck tell it, his human trainees can be at least as difficult as his four-legged students.

First-time director Cindy Meehl follows Buck through a variety of workshops, shows us how he trains horses, and allows him tell his story in a slow, relaxed way that's completely engaging.

Buck is exceptionally good at what he does, but he can't always work miracles. In the film's most heartbreaking segment, he's unable to school a horse whose predatory impulses can't be curbed. He also makes clear that the horse's owner (not the horse) is responsible for the fact that the horse must be put down.

Buck leaves us wondering what happened to Buck's older brother, but a couple of loose ends can't negate what Meehl's beautifully shot documentary accomplishes: It tells a strong and involving story about a man who seems totally inseparable from what he does.

A history lesson from Robert Redford

The Conspirator tells an interesting story, but it's awfully earnest -- and that's the trouble.

What do you do when a movie tackles an interesting subject, boasts a prestigious cast, delivers a message with which you generally agree, and you still give it your enthusiastic endorsement?

Here's what I do: I say that you may want to see Robert Redford's new movie The Conspirator, but you probably shouldn't expect to be blown away. Redford's movie has its virtues, but it's also overly earnest and dry, a bit of civics lesson on film.

I'm betting that not many Americans know the story of Mary Surratt, a 42-year-old woman who was hanged in 1865 for being part of the conspiracy that led to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth. Surratt, a staunch Catholic and proud Southerner, owned a Washington, D.C., boarding house where the conspirators plotted the president's murder. She claimed innocence.

At one point, Surratt was offered leniency on condition that she disclose the whereabouts of her youngest son, John. John later admitted to helping hatch a plot to kidnap Lincoln, but insisted that he had no part in the president's assassination. John Surratt remained in hiding during his mother's trial; he ultimately was tried and acquitted.

In telling Surratt's story, Redford takes a step forward from his last directorial outing, 2007's Lions For Lambs. Preachy and obvious, Lions made a head-on attempt to deal with the consequences of the war in Afghanistan. Steeped in period atmosphere, The Conspirator proves more subtle, although it's impossible not to see parallels between the issues raised by the Surratt trial and those surrounding military proceedings at Guantanamo.

Rather than providing us with a definitive answer about Surratt's guilt, Redford uses the movie to defend a principle: A nation of laws - especially during times of heated public sentiment -- must offer fair trials even to those whose guilt seems beyond question. Justice must be served; the craving for vengeance, resisted.

Working from a script by James D. Solomon, Redford focuses on Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy), the lawyer who's assigned to defend Surratt before a military tribunal.

At first Aiken wants no part of the Surratt case. Like just about everyone else in Washington, he has little doubt about her guilt. As the story develops, Aiken begins to understand that, at minimum, Surratt deserves a hearing, something the military seems disinclined to provide.

Redford surrounds McAvoy with a powerful cast. Robin Wright portrays Surratt as a strong and devoted mother: She won't betray her son to save he own life. Surratt makes no bones about her loyalty to the Confederacy, but insists she knew nothing about what the plotters were discussing when they gathered in her boarding house.

Tom Wilkinson plays Reverdy Johnson, the Maryland lawyer who involved Aiken in Surratt's defense; Danny Huston portrays Joseph Holt, the prosecuting attorney; and Kevin Kline appears as Edwin Stanton, Lincoln's Secretary of War.

According to the movie, Stanton wanted a quick verdict; he was interested in satisfying the public hunger for vengeance that followed the assassination. Kline's Stanton is a severe, unforgiving man who thinks the demands of the nation, as he sees them, take precedence over individual rights.

Evan Rachel Wood terrific as Veda Pierce in HBO's recent version of Mildred Pierce, brings emotional urgency to a movie that sometimes seems to be striking courtroom-drama poses. She plays Surratt's daughter.

Credit Redford & company for attempting to illuminate a little-known chapter of American history, and giving the movie a persuasive period look, but The Conspirator can feel restricted by its courtroom setting and by what seems a carefully worked-out agenda, the need to remind us that emergency situations shouldn't obliterate our freedoms. At times, the movie seems as committed to making points as it is to telling a story.

Still, there's no point damning Redford's effort, even if it ultimately emerges as a musty addition to the canon of socially conscious movies that don't so much raise questions as answer them.