Word: skerritt
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...matter surrounding a relatively small core of solid substance." The movie, adapted from Carl Sagan's novel, is good -- up to a point -- on the inevitable hubbub that follows. Leading it are a national security adviser (James Woods) going nastily paranoid about space invasion; a presidential science adviser (Tom Skerritt) trying to shunt Ellie out of the loop as the government builds the shuttle (plans kindly provided by the aliens) needed to penetrate our newly defined outer limits; and Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey), a sort of New Age Billy Graham who has wormed his way into the high councils...
...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...
...this is because the screenwriter, 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...