Word: macleans
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...hoping to get a chance to read "A River Runs Through It" before seeing the film version. I had been warned that Robert Redford's cinematic version of the Norman Maclean novella might not be quite as clear as the waters that run through Missoula, Montana...
Unfortunately, it is difficult to get past the beautiful scenery and period sets to the true meaning underneath. With narration by Redford, the film opens with sepia-tone photographs of turn-of-the-century main street contrasted with the Montana wilderness. It's clear that Redford wishes Maclean's childhood had been...
...while the audience is puzzling that out, "A River Runs Through It" happily recounts the Huckleberry Finn-like childhood of Norman Maclean (played by Craig Sheffer) and his brother Paul (Brad Pitt). Their father (Tom Skerritt) is both a preacher and a fisher, sermonizing from the pulpit, the study and from the river banks. The Reverend Maclean teaches them equal respect for God's word and God's fish. As he is happy to remind his children, the apostles were all fishers - and fly fishers at that...
...Richard Friedenberg, has gently expanded the original work, using family history gathered from the writer (who died in 1990) and his children. He has added some colorful boyhood anecdotes and, most important, has developed the boys' relationship with their father, a Presbyterian minister (Tom Skerritt), as well as Norman Maclean's courtship of his wife, Jessie (Emily Lloyd), more fully than they are in the book. Partly it is because director Robert Redford has rigorously maintained the understated tone of a book that never plea-bargains, never asks outright for sympathy or understanding, yet ultimately, powerfully, elicits both...
...gambles. He womanizes carelessly. It is only on the river that he asserts his true strength as a guileful fisherman, a man who makes a hard-won skill look easy. Here (and here alone) he is clearly a better man than his father and his brother. But since, as Maclean says in the first sentence of his book, "there was no clear line between religion and fly-fishing" in his family, this is no small matter...