Word: redfords
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Bankrolled by a Seattle multimedia firm, Smoke Signals was shot on a $1.7 million budget after being developed at Robert Redford's Sundance Institute, which sponsors a program for fledgling Native American filmmakers. Though he had been approached by producers eager to adapt his works to the screen, Alexie bided his time until he found an Indian director with respect for the material. Enter Chris Eyre, a 28-year-old Cheyenne-Arapaho director of shorts and documentaries, who read Alexie's book and cold-called him for a meeting. Their film, later acquired by Miramax for close to $3 million...
...that one doubts the purity of purpose that led Redford to The Horse Whisperer, based on Nicholas Evans' best-selling, critically dissed novel about an uncannily simpatico wrangler. His patient ministrations are needed to restore psychological wholeness to Pilgrim and, more important, to Grace (Scarlett Johansson), the horse's adolescent rider, after a bloody confrontation with a truck on an icy road...
...Redford the director has long been drawn to stories of young people whose innocence has been soiled by cruel circumstance, starting with Ordinary People, later in A River Runs Through It (and even, stretching a point, Quiz Show...
...Redford's Tom Booker is up for that as well. Not anything so vulgar as a raw sexual encounter, mind you--nothing that would interfere with our contemplation of the simple, natural life that this movie is determined to idealize. But some soulful slow dancing, some rides into the sunset--the saintly Tom, all rueful smiles and gentle wisdom, can winsomely manage that. The question is, can we manage nearly three hours in the company of so perfect a male animal, a figure from whom, in fact, everything animalistic--for that matter, anything jaggedly human--has been blanched? There comes...
Doubtless Redford believes in the ideals that animate this movie--as who among us does not? But the very fact that he is so well known and widely applauded for his many good, politically and artistically correct works offscreen helps make the movie seem self-regarding, self-righteous, even smug. There was once something of the wicked kid in Redford's screen character, and one fondly imagined that he would someday grow up to be, if not a dirty old man, then a subversive and obstreperous one. Certainly we never guessed he'd end up a rustic bore like...