Remembering Redford

Great actor, misguided activist.

by Bruce Bawer

For a long time, Robert Redford, who died on Tuesday at the age of 89, was the biggest male star around. He became an Oscar-winning director. And he founded the Sundance Film Festival, which has been the cornerstone of indie film for almost half a century.

Alas, he was also a left-wing activist who too often put his activism into his work, which is almost never a good thing.

I’d forgotten that he played Dan Rather in a movie about the scandal that ended Rather’s career. You’ll recall that Rather, who at the time was the anchor of CBS Evening News, made damning accusations about George W. Bush on the air, citing documents that supposedly dated back to the era of Bush’s National Guard service but that had obviously been forged many years later. In the movie, which was entitled (of all things) Truth and was written and directed by James Vanderbilt, Rather is presented as a journalistic hero rather than as an exceptionally stubborn and strangely obtuse Democratic Party shill. After the film’s release in 2015, a CBS spokesman commented, “It’s astounding how little truth there is in Truth. … The film tries to turn gross errors of journalism and judgment into acts of heroism and martyrdom.”

Truth was hardly a departure for Redford, who was always a sucker for left-wing message-mongering. In 2007 he directed and starred in what was perhaps the very worst of the crop of terrible movies about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that were churned out by Hollywood in the decade or so after 9/11. Lions for Lambs was essentially one long, talky, self-important lecture by Redford’s character, a left-wing professor, with occasional cutaways to scenes in which a liberal journalist (Meryl Streep) interviews a conservative senator (Tom Cruise) about Afghanistan war strategy. It was astonishing that not one but three top stars had agreed to sign on for this preachy, inert piece of junk.

There was more, much more. In The Company You Keep (2012), directed by Redford himself, the protagonist, whom he played, is a former Weather Underground terrorist with whom we are invited to sympathize. Several of the other pictures that he directed — but didn’t appear in — were also, shall we say, nakedly partisan. The Milagro Beanfield War (1988), as I wrote in my review for The American Spectator, was a “crudely tendentious” picture that glorified (but also patronized) a community of dirt-poor Latinos in New Mexico while demonizing Anglo land developers — all without a hint of subtlety or nuance. Quiz Show (1994) made a hero out of Richard Goodwin, who uncovered the quiz-show cheating of the 1950s but whose own shenanigans as a White House staffer under JFK and LBJ were far more morally reprehensible —not to mention far more consequential — than the quiz-show scam itself. And let’s not leave out the fact that Redford was executive producer of The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), which romanticized the story of Che Guevara’s youth. Appalling.

We got a hint of Redford’s penchant for politics early on: in The Candidate (1972), written by a speechwriter for Eugene McCarthy, Redford plays an idealistic California senate candidate who, over the course of the campaign, gradually compromises his ideals. The Way We Were (1973) was a genuinely engaging love story, but it was also yet another piece of Hollywood hand-wringing about the Blacklist, and it shamelessly equated the unrepentant Stalinism of Redford’s love interest, played by Barbra Streisand, with high moral virtue. And All the President’s Men (1976), of course, depicted Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and their left-wing bosses at the Washington Post as saviors of American democracy rather than as Democratic Party tools who were determined to bring down Nixon.

All of which is a shame. Because when politics weren’t involved, Redford was pretty savvy about picking projects. Barefoot in the Park, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Downhill Racer, The Sting, Three Days of the Condor, The Natural: this was all great stuff. Ordinary People (1980), his first directorial effort, was a tender family story that was handled throughout with sensitivity and insight. And who can deny that Redford was a terrific actor with an immense, effortless all-American charm? (Never mind his anti-American politics.) If anything, he was underrated as a performer, receiving only one Academy Award nomination for acting (for The Sting). I can’t deny that, over the years, Redford brought me hours of great pleasure. By all accounts, moreover, he was a nice guy: I met him once, very briefly, and spoke to him once or twice on the phone, also very briefly. He was consistently congenial and polite.

But damn it, the politics! After his death, Jane Fonda, the abominable traitor who starred with him in several movies, commented: “He stood for an America we have to keep fighting for.” What more needs to be said?

First published in The Spectator.