Word: redfords
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Schrader is his own best publicist. He knows that in Hollywood movies may be the art of the deal, but in Cannes -- where thousands of journalists swarmed around Hearst, Robert Redford and Richard Gere -- movies are the art of the interview. So praise be to Director John Waters, whose catty ebullience suggests Oscar Wilde without the angst. And all hail to David Lean, emperor of the epic, who charmed with his bluff majesty and his tut-tutting about Britain's new "miniature" film industry...
...never emerges from behind the camera, but every frame tells you who directed The Milagro Beanfield War. This movie even looks like Robert Redford: it's smart and handsome, with a crinkly smile around the edges. It boasts wistful vistas and umber landscapes. Clouds stampede over the northern New Mexico terrain, where hillocks perch like adobe huts. The kiss of two fine brown faces is silhouetted by an orange sunset, flaring into sympathetic melodrama. Night falls, and there's a rope of rainbow in the sky; a frosted moon smiles behind a scrim of mist. It makes for quite...
...film thinks like Redford too: its passionate humanism is laced with wry. For Redford is not only Hollywood's last hero. He is a benevolent movie mogul, using his Sundance Institute to finance noble independent films in the pastoral mode. Alas, most of these films have been lame and prissy. Perhaps one reason Redford made Milagro was to show the young directors at Sundance that a well-meaning film can also be a good movie...
These scenes carry hints that Redford wants to update some classic movie parables. Milagro could be Chinatown, with its diverted water supply and political-industrial intrigue. Or Silkwood, with a heroic loner fatally bucking the system. Or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, with the greedy Anglos outsmarted by wily Hispanic outlaws who snort, "We don't need no stinkin' condos...
...Robert Redford directs The Milagro Beanfield War, a humanist parable with all the right motives and a few of the wrong moves...