‘BANTER’ WITH ROBERT REDFORD: Forever the Sundance Kid, He Was Hollywood’s Ultimate Outlaw Icon
“Dad loves hearing people’s stories. When he talks to people, he really listens and wants to know all about you. He’ll follow you home.”— Jamie Redford
“I enjoy the banter.” — Robert Redford
By Gregory N. Joseph
Robert Redford let it be known that he would likely retire from acting upon completion of his starring role as a charming career criminal in the 2018 film “The Old Man & the Gun,” upsetting fans around the world, who wouldn’t — and couldn’t — believe it. Indeed, there seemed to be the tantalizing possibility that he hadn’t really made up his mind: When the veteran CNN interviewer Christiane Amanpour pressed him on the subject, hoping for a scoop in pinning him down, he demurred, calmly and simply replying, “Maybe,” adding with a shrug that he didn’t think it was a big deal. But it was.
Literally generations had grown up watching films he had acted in, directed or produced. He was part of our lives, and us. If we didn’t take him for granted, we did the next best thing and supposed somehow that he would live forever. It only seemed fair, to him and to us.
His movies certainly marked memorable moments in my own life. His 1972 film “Jeremiah Johnson,” a favorite role of his in which he played a legendary mountain man, was the first movie my wife and I saw after we were married. When it was announced that he had bought the film rights to “All the President’s Men,” the book that evolved from Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on the Watergate scandal for The Washington Post, I heard the news on the car radio as my wife and I were giving my parents a driving tour of Los Angeles, their first visit with us as young marrieds and their first trip to the West Coast. And when the finished product by the same name, arguably the greatest movie ever made about journalism, reached theaters in 1976, it was the first film I ever saw with my in-laws, coming, appropriately enough, as I was beginning a job as a reporter on the big newspaper in their town after moving there. I could go on. And truth to tell, I’m probably not that different in that regard from anyone else in saying Redford films served as benchmarks in our lives.
“Redford, at fifty, is a lock, a guarantee, a walk to the teller’s window,” journalist Mike Barnicle wrote in Esquire magazine in March 1988. “He is larger than life and more bankable than any bond, stock, or piece of beachfront property that all the people in his business, all those smarmy, well-tanned and worked-out people, pressing iron and doing wrist curls with one-hundred-dollar bills, could ever dream of purchasing. Robert Redford is a star. A huge star. He is a guy who can change your life just by returning your phone calls. Calls from politicians puckering up for a picture, a campaign visit, or — heart be still — a fundraiser with the Golden Wonder; a ballot box version of ‘Jaws.’ Calls from agents, directors, or that particular day’s studio head who will do almost anything and certainly give everything just for a nod, maybe a good meeting, or — could God ever be so great? — an actual commitment to make their movie … and thus, make their little shop all the wealthier … The karma, the duende, the whatever-you-want-to-call-it that also married Brando, Monroe, Newman, and McQueen. It is a lightning bolt that causes men in Ames, Iowa, to think as they nestle into a seat halfway down the aisle of some theater, ‘Hey. That Redford. He acts sort of like me.’”
But it turned out to be true that this marked Redford’s last screen appearance, save for a cameo in the television miniseries “Dark Winds,” a passion project of his based on Tony Hillerman stories about Native American detectives it had taken him years to make and he had co-executive produced. (His brief appearance in 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame ” was shot before “The Old Man & the Gun.”) The final starring performance, fittingly, earned him a Golden Globe nomination as Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy, while the National Board of Review named the movie one of the year’s top ten independent films. He went out in style.
He passed away seven years later, dying in his sleep at the age of 89 on Sept. 16, 2025, “at his home at Sundance in the mountains of Utah — the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved,” according to his publicist.
A tsunami of tributes from around the world poured in, from entertainers, activists, politicians, and fans, even those who didn’t agree with all of his ideological stances. People, famous and otherwise, were shaken.
The Academy Award-winning actress, singer and director Barbra Streisand, who had co-starred with him in the 1973 romantic-drama movie blockbuster, “The Way We Were,” which brought her an Oscar nomination as Best Actress, had written in her 2023 memoir, “My Name Is Barbra”: “Bob is that rare combination … an intellectual cowboy … a charismatic star who is also one of the finest actors of his generation. But like my husband (James Brolin), he’s almost apologetic about his looks, and I liked that about him.” She had pursued Redford mightily to co-star in the film, uncharacteristically agreeing to change the script and expand his role in order to land him.
At his passing, she added: “Every day on the set of ‘The Way We Were’ was exciting, intense and pure joy … The last time I saw him, when he came to lunch, we discussed art and decided to send each other our first drawings. He was one of a kind and I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with him.”
Another Oscar-winning actress, Jane Fonda, Redford’s co-star in four films spanning 50 years — “The Chase” (1966), “Barefoot in the Park” (1967), “Electric Horseman” (1979) and “Our Souls at Night” (2017) — said: ”I can’t stop crying. He meant a lot to me and was a beautiful person in every way. He stood for an America we have to keep fighting for.”
Yet another Oscar-winning actress, Meryl Streep, who co-starred with him in the Academy Award-winning Best Picture “Out of Africa” (1985), which also brought her a Best Actress nomination for the award, said: “A lion has passed. Rest in peace, my lovely friend.”
Actor Ethan Hawke recalled auditioning for Redford for a role in the 1992 film he was directing, “A River Runs Through It.” Redford gently told Hawke he nailed the reading but was too young for the part, adding that he would have a great career — then showed up unannounced to see Hawke performing in an Off-Off-Broadway production and made a point of coming backstage afterward to sing his praises.
Actor Rob Lowe told of the thrill of being seated near Redford at the Golden Globe Awards and sheepishly waiting to ask for a selfie with him, telling Redford he had been his inspiration, that seeing him in his 1975 film “Three Days of the Condor” was what made him want to become an actor.
Oscar-winning actor Dustin Hoffman, who played Bernstein to Redford’s Woodward in “All the President’s Men,” had this to say: “Working with Redford was one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had. He was that rare person where what you see is what you get: the decency he projected in his movies was genuine. I’ll miss him.”
It’s worth noting that it was Redford who insisted upon casting Jason Robards, an alcoholic whose career was on the wane and who had been in a serious car accident shortly before that left him disfigured, in the pivotal role of Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee in that film. Redford wanted to repay Robards for his kindness toward him early in his career. Robards won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his performance.
Bob Woodward himself described Redford as “a noble and principled force for good” in paying tribute to him.
“His impact and influence on my life cannot be overstated,” Woodward said. “I loved him, and admired him — for his friendship, his fiery independence, and the way he used any platform he had to help make the world better, fairer, brighter for others.”
The journalist credited Redford with encouraging him and Bernstein to “tell the Watergate story through the eyes and experiences of our reporting and the relations between the two of us.” That recommendation was realized in the best-selling book, which became the basis for Alan J. Pakula’s award-winning film, which in turn inspired many young people to pursue careers in journalism.
“Over 50 years of friendship, he always said what he was going to do and then did it,” Woodward said of Redford, adding: “He will be remembered as one of the great storytellers in our country’s history. He elevated stories beyond the mainstream. He not only cared about the environment, but he took all conceivable actions to protect it.”
Although Redford made his negative feelings known about President Donald Trump — “A light in our country rapidly began to fade the moment Trump entered the picture,” he wrote in August 2019 — Trump gave a grudging nod to the actor upon hearing of his death. “Robert Redford was great; he had a series of years where there was nobody better,” he told reporters as he left the White House for a recent visit to the U.K.
Former President Barack Obama, who presented Redford with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, posted on social media: “We’re deeply saddened by the passing of Robert Redford — a storyteller, trailblazer, and advocate whose life’s work went far beyond the screen.”
The New York Times dedicated page after page to him in the days following his death, recounting his life and legacy in a way usually reserved for the passing of heads of state or Nobel Prize winners. To say that he dominated the news there and about everywhere else that talked about current events is an understatement, and was a reminder, as if we needed one, that this was someone who transcended Hollywood and had moved into the rarefied stratum of a cultural force.
Despite his status, the red carpet wasn’t for him on the most personal of levels. At his request, a very small, private, family-only funeral service was held in Utah, far away from the gaudy Hollywood ostentation he participated in grudgingly as part of his profession but steadfastly eschewed in his personal life. With only his wife, children and grandchildren in attendance, he was laid to rest on his own property at Sundance, north of Provo Canyon.
But if anyone had earned a permanent place in the spotlight, he had.
His acting career stretched across an incredible six decades, and he chafed when people suggested it all started with “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
Born on Aug. 18, 1936, in Santa Monica, Calif., he graduated from Van Nuys High School in 1954, attended the University of Colorado for a year and a half, subsequently lived for a time in France, Spain and Italy, and finally returned to America, where he studied painting at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn before taking acting classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Manhattan, where he was a member of the class of 1959. His first paid acting job came soon — a coveted role in the 1960 “The Case of the Treacherous Toupee” episode of the popular “Perry Mason” TV series, a courtroom drama that had gained a cult following and was a Saturday night staple of the top-rated CBS network (he never forgot the part, adding with a wistful shake of the head, “I have no idea what that title meant”).
His first major notices came as the star of Neil Simon’s 1963 Broadway play, “Barefoot in the Park,” the playwright’s longest-running hit, and the tenth-longest running non-musical play in Broadway history (Redford went on to also star in the 1967 film adaptation). In his 1996 memoir “Rewrites,” Simon (who died in 2018 at the age of 91), wrote: “I had never met anyone like Redford before. Certainly not in New York City. He may have looked like the Marlboro Man, but he had a keen and deceptive intelligence. He didn’t always open up to who he was, because to tell the truth, I think that at twenty-six he was still forming his personality, and being an actor was possibly in conflict with the man he was trying to be.”
The same year as “Butch Cassidy” — 1969 — Redford had starred in two other very good films, “Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here” and “Downhill Racer.” He had already been a ubiquitous presence on television in the late 1950s and early ’60s, appearing in nearly all the most noteworthy and popular series of the time. On May 18, 1960, he scored a major supporting role in the final broadcast of “Playhouse 90,” perhaps the era’s most prestigious anthology program, giving a performance so nuanced and courageously passionate as a conflicted young Nazi soldier that it provoked furious debate in a country that was not that far removed from the horrors of World War II (indeed, the arrest and trial of major Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann was coincidentally unfolding at the time the show aired). The production, “In the Presence of Mine Enemies,” hugely controversial because of the times, was a drama about the Warsaw ghetto from a script written by Rod Serling and boasted a cast made up of some of the most respected actors of the day, including Charles Laughton, Arthur Kennedy, George Macready, Oscar Homolka, Sam Jaffe and Susan Kohner. Redford, who received an “introducing” credit, stood out among these heavyweights. New York Times critic Jack Gould wrote: “As the young lieutenant with a conscience, Mr. Redford, a newcomer to the ranks of TV stars, made an exceptional contribution in his depiction of a man trying to reconcile a personal code with military brutality.” Not everyone was happy with the production and attacked its being made at all. “Exodus” author Leon Uris, whose 1958 novel “Exodus” explored the the plight of Jewish refugees and the establishment of Israel (ironically Paul Newman would star in the film adptation of the book released the same year as this play) sent a blistering note to CBS demanding that the negative be destroyed. The network’s switchboard was inundated with complaints, charging antisemitism, with a good dose of criticism directed at Redford’s sympathetic portrayal of the young Nazi. Whatever one thought of the production, his performance was remarkably brave and insightful for one so young. He was all of 23 years old. Apparently his ability to plumb the depths of human nature so well at such a young age was not lost on Serling; on Jan. 5, 1962, in the “Nothing in the Dark” episode of Serling’s iconic series “The Twilight Zone,” Redford was cast as Death in the guise of young policeman who had come to collect an elderly woman played by the esteemed actress Dame Gladys Cooper. It is one of the most famous installments of that classic series, and one that Redford looked back on with pride for the remainder of his life.
Not that Redford got every role he sought. He auditioned for the starring part of the rudderless college graduate Benjamin Braddock in the 1967 film “The Graduate,” but despite his early successes, was famously rejected. “I wanted that part a lot,” Redford ruefully admitted to me (some sources inaccurately say he turned it down). Hoffman, his future “All the President’s Men” co-star, was given the role instead. The film, a runaway hit that helped define a generation, earned Hoffman an Oscar nomination and made him a star (Rod Steiger took home the gold for his performance as a gun-chewing Deep South police chief opposite Sidney Poitier in the civil rights drama “In the Heat of the Night”). “I interviewed hundreds, maybe thousands, of men” for the role, the film’s director, Mike Nichols, recalled to “Vanity Fair,” adding that when Redford came along, “I said, ‘You can’t play it. You can never play a loser. And Redford said. ‘What do you mean? Of course I can play a loser.’ And I said, ‘OK, have you ever struck out with a girl?’ And he said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he wasn’t joking.” He also unsuccessfully sought one of the lead roles, that of the male prostitute Joe Buck, in the 1969 film “Midnight Cowboy,” which, ironically beat out “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” for Best Picture in that year’s Oscar race. “Robert Redford’s agent also asked to see the screenplay, saying Redford was intrigued … the answer was thank you, he’s a terrific actor, but no thank you,” director John Schlesinger is quoted as saying in Glenn Frankel’s excellent book, “Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic.” That film brought Oscar nominations for both of its two leads, Jon Voight, who wound up with the role of Joe Buck, and once again for Hoffman, who played Rico “Ratso” Rizzo, the seedy, street-wise and ill-fated con man with a limp who befriends him (they lost the Oscar to John Wayne for his broad, career-peaking turn as the paunchy, one-eyed lawman Rooster Cogburn in the comic Western “True Grit”).
Redford had built a sturdy if unspectacular resume before “Butch Cassidy,” but that whimsical “buddy” Western, set in the late 1800’s and very loosely based on two real-life robbers, elevated him to rarefied heights as a bona fide Hollywood superstar and even more, imbuing him with international fame and cementing his status as an icon who defined an era in a way few others had, something that alternately proved both help and hindrance, as is often the case for performers of such readily identifable uniqueness.
“He isn’t exactly a Robert Redford” became a way to describe a man’s looks, the very mention of his name shorthand for a glamour attained by a precious few stars, from Valentino to Gable to Brando to Monroe. He had become one of them.
With a final gross in the United States of more than $100 million, “Butch Cassidy” was the country’s top-grossing film released in 1969 (it was the eighth-most popular film of 1970 in France). “The Sting,” like “Butch Cassidy,” was a “buddy” comedy-drama shoot-’em-upper also starring Redford and Newman as partners in crime, this time plopping them in the midst of a gangster tale set during the raucous Great Depression; opening on Christmas Day four years later, it grossed $156 million in the U.S. and Canada in 1973 and early 1974; its worldwide gross reached a whopping $257 million.
Promoters of “The Sting,” no fools they, ingeniously linked the two movies in their advertising campaign with the tagline: “This time they might get away with it.”
“The Sting” won the Academy Award for Best Picture and Redford’s performance as the revenge-seeking grifter Johnny Hooker earned him his only Oscar nomination for acting — a career-long slight that over the years infuriated his fans and puzzled critics (he lost the year of “The Sting” to Jack Lemmon, who won the lead actor award for his jarringly intense portrayal of a beleaguered middle-aged businessman having a mental breakdown in “Save the Tiger”).
In 2003, “Butch Cassidy” was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant,” and two years later, in 2005, “The Sting” was accorded the same honor.
For most Hollywood leading men, all of this would have been more than enough. But not for Redford. It wasn’t that he wanted more, he wanted to do more.
He used his power and popularity as perhaps no American film star ever has.
Like so many successful actors, he began directing and producing. He won an Oscar for his first directorial effort, 1980’s “Ordinary People,” which which was produced by his own Wildwood Enterprises and also won the Academy Award as the year’s Best Picture. He and his film matched the feat at the Golden Globes. (The story— about the disintegration of a wealthy family after one son dies in an accident and the other attempts suicide — appealed to a surprisingly wide swath of people, among them Pope Leo XIV; the 70-year-old, Chicago-born pontiff named it as one of his four favorite movies, along with “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “The Sound of Music” and “Life Is Beautiful.”)
Having performed the hat trick as actor, director and producer in conquering Hollywood, Redford surprised many by going on to become America’s greatest proponent of independent film, opening doors for many outside Hollywood’s rigid, bottom-line-based studio system; his Sundance Film Festival, organized by the Sundance Institute he founded, has become the largest independent film festival in the United States and one of the world’s most influential. And there was more: He became an outspoken advocate for the environment, Native Americans and LGBTQ rights.
In 2005, Redford and his son, Jamie, a documentary filmmaker and environmentalist who died in 2020 at age 58 from bile duct cancer, introduced The Redford Center, merging the powers of environmental justice, collective action, education, and impact filmmaking. In addition, Robert Redford was a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), organized environmental meetings, addressed the United Nations, and used his Sundance Institute to bring artists and scientists together to discuss environmental solutions.
“I’m an actor by trade, but I’m an activist by nature, somebody who’s always believed that we must find the balance between what we develop for our survival and what we preserve,” Redford said in his address to the UN General Assembly’s High-Level Meeting on Climate Change in 2016.
He was never shy about speaking up. “My Dad has swum with sharks, he doesn’t play the game,” Jamie reminded us. By any standard, especially in Hollywood, where concerns about careers bring about public relations-driven apologies or outright silence for fear of antagonizing the powerful and alienating one’s fan base, he was a true original in carving his own path. Moving to Utah was an apt metaphor for this movie star who went his own way, on his own terms.
Respected for his actions on and off the screen, his accolades were numerous, including two Academy Awards, a British Academy Film Award, five Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award, and Kennedy Center honors.
Late in his life, friends and family urged him to slow down amid health concerns. A mutual friend, the widow of an actor who had acted in several of Redford’s films, confided to me several years ago, “He isn’t well.” After a business trip to England to promote Sundance, he was treated for extreme exhaustion and calls for him to cut back on his schedule heightened. His response: “I’ll have time to rest when I die! HA!”
Over the years, we stayed in touch through emails, letters and notes. “I enjoy the banter,” he said.
When I told him that one of our daughters was seriously ill and in the hospital, and that she and our family, who were staying with her around the clock, had watched a film he had directed and it raised our spirits, he replied: “I know where you’re coming from — I can remember sleeping standing up when one of our kids was in the hospital.”
I reached him early one fall Saturday morning when he was in New York, telling him how much we had enjoyed watching a miniseries the night before on the Sundance Channel, that our daughters had discovered it and loved it. “What a great way to wake up and start the day!” he said.
Then I mentioned that my wife had surprised me with a copy of Michael Feeney Callan’s biography of him. “Oh — that book! It makes me sound like an ass!” he said. A mutual friend had mentioned a biography of Redford that he absolutely hated, and I didn’t put two and two together — until now. (After Redford’s passing, Callan was interviewed on Canadian television as though he and Redford had been bosom buddies, with no mention of what Redford’s true feelings were about his book. The moral of the story: Don’t believe everything you hear in interviews about famous people.)
Another time he messaged me after finishing filming “All Is Lost,” in which he was the only onscreen character, a man lost at sea: “If all goes as I think it will, it’ll bring the Gold Man. Byllie (his second wife, the artist and environmentalist Sibylle Szaggars) thinks I’m finally going to get my acting Oscar.”
Perhaps Bob Redford’s greatest film performance, the 2013 drama was physically demanding (it cost him part of his hearing in one ear). He had only about 50 words of dialogue, but it was a tour de force of concentrated minimalism summoning all of his experience and years of acting. He was 77 years old at the time it was shot. The role brought him a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival, the New York Film Critics Circle award for Best Actor, and a nod from the Golden Globes, but not so much as a nomination for an Oscar, which enraged his fans and puzzled critics. “I don’t do films for awards,” he said afterward, but it was clearly a bitter disappointment.
Most of all, we shared some laughs.
He frequently used quotes from his films in jokes with me to make a point (as when he paraphrased famous lines from “Butch Cassidy”: “Who is this guy?” or “You just keep doin’ the thinking, that ‘s what you’re good at”). He was especially amused when I turned the tables on him in imitating one of the more famous pranks he had played on Newman, who became his lifelong friend, and following his example, a fellow philanthropist. It turns out they both liked cars too. A lot.
Redford had introduced Newman to racing, and Newman had become obsessed. “He talked so much about it that I got sick of it,” Redford explained. He came up with an idea: “We played lots of pranks on each other, so I had a beaten-up Porsche shell delivered to his porch for his 50th birthday. I called a towing service and said, ‘Do you have any crushed automobiles? Do you have a Porsche?’ They said, ‘It’s funny you should mention that. We had a car fall off a track and land on a Porsche and crush it.’” Redford had the crushed coupe fully gift-wrapped and delivered to his pal.
Our running gag revolved around an Aston Martin instead. I said I wanted it and deserved it more than anybody, that he should give it to me. We verbally sparred good-naturedly for a long time, and at one point, he found a photo of a wrecked Aston Martin and made it the cover of our private Facebook chatroom, dedicating it to me. I countered by sending him a boxed, bright-red metal model of the car, but left it intact, noting that I didn’t have the heart to squash it. My gift brought a quick note from him.
We sometimes exchanged messages in the wee hours because we were both night owls. When he confided that this his wife had made him go to the other room to read late at night because it disturbed her sleep, I responded that if Robert Redford’s wife booted him out of the bed, it took the sting out of it happening to me. “We’re twins!” he replied.
I struggled with calling him “Bob.” It seemed discourteous and contrived, name-dropping in the extreme.
When I explained that his principled views and values resembled those of my parents, he responded, “No — we’re in brother territory.” He refused to place himself above others. To him, respect worked both ways. He said talking to people from all walks of life, listening to their stories, kept him grounded, a reminder of the lower middle-class background from which he came as well as the artificial and ephemeral nature of fame.
“Don’t call him Mr. Redford,” Jamie Redford once gently counseled me. “He won’t answer if you call him that.”
In 2021, he sent a letter thanking me for my birthday wishes on his 85th birthday. It read in part, “As I celebrate another birthday, I wonder: how did tomorrow become yesterday so quickly? As we’ve been told, time marches on, and with change all around us, what shines brightly is the gift of your friendship, and I am grateful for that.”
It was signed: “In appreciation, Bob.”
(Following is my review of “The Old Man & the Gun,” in which Robert Redford had his final starring role. Upon reading it, the great star immediately sent a lovely note, which began: “Your review and thoughts were great and I enjoyed them immensely … “ I treasure it.)
By Gregory N. Joseph
The Old Man & the Gun is a true anomaly: a crime comedy film — that really works.
Based on a 2003 article by David Grann in The New Yorker, later appearing in his 2010 book The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, the film focuses on the escapades — and escapes — of Forrest Silva “Woody” Tucker (1920–2004), whose lengthy string of bank heists and prison “walkways” at first irritated law authorities but ultimately won their grudging respect and charmed a disbelieving public.
A one-time inmate of Alcatraz whose most famous escape was from San Quentin, he never met a bank he didn’t like. To rob. It’s estimated his total take over the years amounted to $4 million.
In the words of one character in the film, “For him, robbing banks isn’t a way of making a living — it’s his life.”
In the film, directed by David Lowery from a screenplay he wrote, Robert Redford plays Tucker like a world-class musician stroking a Stradivarius violin, a master who knows exactly how to play a master instrument. The actor, who hints that this may be his last screen performance, packs all of the wares learned and honed in his 60-year career into the complicated tragicomic man that Tucker was.
As Tucker, Redford, one of the screen’s great minimalists, deals in nuance where lesser actors might have used gaudy broad brushstrokes. He is sad, funny, endearing, maddening, strong, weak, restrained and driven.
He falls in love with, and is loved by, Jewel (Sissy Spacek), a winsome and trusting woman he stops to help on the freeway when her pickup truck breaks down. No screen female plays deep, inexplicable and true, dedicated love like Spacek, who is perfectly cast as the classy girlfriend who can’t explain why she is drawn to a character like this, and doesn’t really try.
Soon after meeting, Forrest and Jewel have coffee at a greasy spoon cafe, and she asks him what he does for a living. Tucker hesitates, remarking embarrassingly (sort of) that if she knew, she wouldn’t like him. Of course, he’s totally wrong: He scribbles his “occupation” on a slip of paper, slides it across the table, she giggles, straightens up — and realizes it to be true but that it doesn’t matter, somehow.
Redford’s buddies, Teddy and Waller, played with delightful understated comic precision by Danny Glover and Tom Waits respectively, bring to mind what Butch and Sundance’s gang might have looked like if transported to modern times — supportive, sharp and sassy. And completely compelling and believable.
One of the best aspects of the film is the bond established between Forrest and the lawman who trails him, Detective John Hunt (Casey Affleck).
Hunt meets him twice “accidentally,” and I won’t give away the circumstances here, but both times are at once mythic and touching. Affleck’s dedicated, exhausted cop is a man who believes in the law but understands the humanity of the people who break it. He’s a devoted family man who genuinely cares about people, but is also determined to nab the bad guys even when he’s out on his feet, which is most of the time. Affleck, with a subtle, sweet and understanding drawl, nails it. Tiki Sumpter as his wife, Maureen, is outstanding as the soulmate who both comforts and challenges him.
One of the many gems in the film is Elizabeth Moss’ turn as Forrest’s daughter, who really doesn’t know him, but innately understands him. It’s sensational casting — she looks like she could be the daughter of Redford’s screen character. Her explanation about Forrest’s life to Affleck’s detective is stunningly played, building with a quiet anger and an unmistakable love.
A strength of this film is the casting of the so-called minor characters involved in Forrest’s robberies. They’re uniformly terrific, not a clunker in the bunch, which gives the story depth and realism. We’re watching people react we feel we know. One bank official, startled at Forrest’s audacity, and scared, can’t help but tell police how much of a real gentleman Forrest is. Later in the film, a young woman bank teller starts to cry, Forrest becomes alarmed and asks her why, and she manages a giggle while still crying. Try that!
Lowery’s script avoids cliches and gets at the characters in a sure-handed way that respects both the actors and the audience, giving everybody credit for being able to connect the dots without forcing it.
The cinematography is darkly lush and appealing while being true to the spirit of this quirky tale.
The real Forrest Tucker (not to be confused with the actor of the same name) was first imprisoned when he was 15. He died in 2004 at the age of 83. In prison.
