Movie Review: "A Walk In the Woods" (At Bryn Mawr Film Institute)

If you feel like you would have enjoyed last year’s Reese Witherspoon Oscar-bait film The Wild more had it instead been a buddy comedy starring two men in their 70s, A Walk in the Woods is the movie for you. It’s a relatively minor film and won’t be especially memorable, but it’s got a couple of good things going for it: Beautiful outdoor vistas, and some fantastic banter between stars Robert Redford and Nick Nolte.

Redford plays Bryson, a real-life writer with a long string of bestsellers about his various worldwide travels. Having returned from abroad with a case of writers block and little to do aside from hang around his large house with his wife (Emma Thompson) and children and grandkids, Bryson decides to hike the entire length of Appalachian Trail, Georgia to Maine. And since none of this actual friends have any interest in joining him, he takes the trip along with his decades-ago running buddy Stephen Katz (Nick Nolte.) As a 75-year-old obese man with a pronounced limp who was a hardcore alcoholic until very recently, Nolte seems even less a fit for the trail than Redford.

The fim, directed by comedy veteran Ken Kwapis, features beautiful, sweeping photography of mountains, trails and other aspects of the Appalachian Trail. Also, he keeps the pace surprisingly brisk, for a film about a couple of septuagenarians walking slowly across the country.

Nolte is introduced, voice only, in a phone call in which he declares, in his gravelly mumble, “it’s me.” And Redford and Nolte’s banter just gets better from there.

Two years ago Redford directed and starred in a truly strange movie called The Company You Keep, in which he played an aging ex-radical from a Weather Underground-like group, who goes on the lam and visits old friends, all conveniently played by famous actors of Redford’s vintage. If you could get past the incongruity of Nick Nolte ever having been a ‘60s radical, the two mens’ scenes were among the best in that film, and that fine chemistry carries over into A Walk in the Woods.

The two men bicker, reminisce and lament their age, and how their lives went into such different directions, with one a popular novelist and the other a miserable drunk who’s dodging outstanding warrants. One thing is clear- these men have absolutely no business spending even a day on the Trail, much less several months. Although oddly, this physical challenge is nothing compared to what we saw from Redford in his last big film, All is Lost.

Aside from having read one of his books many years ago, I don’t know a whole lot about Bill Bryson’s personality, and after seeing this movie… I still don’t. Redford plays Bryson as something of a cipher as well as a straight man to Nolte. Redford, it should be noted, is a good 30 years older than Bryson was at the time of the film’s events, as this is one of those cases (like Kevin Spacey’s Bobby Darin movie) in which an actor waited so long to adapt a property that he’s now aged out of it but gone ahead and made it anyway. Nolte, though? He’s fantastic. It’s one of the best performances ever from an actor who’s barely able to speak.

The most negative thing I can say about the film is that it slights its women. Great actresses like Thompson and Mary Steenburgen are given very little to do, and a setpiece involving Nolte romancing an overweight woman is just plain ugly, not to mention lifted almost directly from a Thomas Haden Church subplot in Sideways. Kristen Schaal, though, has some amusing moments as a very annoying hiker. And there’s one scene involving a silent, smiling older woman that’s so delightfully creepy that it’s as if A Walk In the Woods turned into a David Lynch movie for two minutes.

As for other supporting players, a bit part as an REI employee might be the most perfect casting of Nick Offerman’s career, as least since he became Ron Swanson.

If you’re an adult, and you waited the entire summer for a movie that’s about people you’re age, it’s finally arrived with A Walk in the Woods.

A Walk in the Woods opens Wednesday at Bryn Mawr Film Institute, Regal Cinemas Edgmont Square 10, UA Main Street Theatre 6, UA King of Prussia and other local theaters.