It was just a few weeks ago that we all enjoyed a movie about a soul-searching thousand-mile hike. This time the same story is fodder for a comedy, but the movie could have been called “Mild.”
Robert Redford plays successful, hard-working, intellectually voracious travel writer Bill Bryson and Nick Nolte plays the one friend who will agree to hike the 1800-mile Appalachian Trail with him from Georgia to Maine. Nolte’s Katz is a crude, slovenly horndog who avers that he spent half his life boozing and chasing tail, but wasted the other half.
The odd-couple pairing inspires a script that’s short on reflection, drama, peril and even laughs. Redford’s comic timing is poor, Nolte’s acting is broad and the script relies heavily on setup-punchline sitcom exchanges like “Nice guys– I hate ’em!” If the boys are told there will be snow tonight, they’ll look up to the blue sky and say, “That’s crazy!” Smash-cut to: a massive blizzard.
Not much happens on the hike and when it does (such as when the friends find themselves stranded on a ledge above a cliff) there’s no sense of danger. Emma Thompson, as Bryson’s wife, and Mary Steenburgen, as a motel owner with whom he flirts for about 10 seconds, are wasted; nor does the film have anything much to say about the disappearing America in which few independent restaurants and motels remain, or about the class gulf between the two men, raised together in Iowa but now separated by the respective choices each has made over the last half-century.
Tame gags are about all the film has to offer. Major distributors were in attendance at the premiere; the chief of one of them left halfway through.