a little movie

Some people don't like Bill Bryson's writing: they find him grumpy. As I'm grumpy myself, I don't mind, as Bryson is only grumpy when it's appropriate: he's not whiny. I also find him very funny, as well as interested in the kinds of absorbing facts I'm interested in.

None of his books is funnier or more interesting than A Walk in the Woods, even though it's about something I have no interest in doing, walking the Appalachian Trail. So I was curious enough to go on the first day of release to see the movie adaptation of it, starring Robert Redford as Bryson and Nick Nolte as his old buddy and walking companion, Stephen Katz. Originally it was going to be made over 25 years ago with Paul Newman as Katz, to reunite that classic pairing, but Newman became too ill and it was shelved.

Making it now, with Redford and Nolte both in their seventies, turns the walk into a last-ditch bucket-list "staving off mortality" trip, and the script is - I suppose sensibly - written that way, rather than the "facing midlife crisis" of the book, where Bryson and Katz were both in their forties. This gives the movie a melancholic tone. It's less of the comedic romp it could have been.

It's also toned-down by subdued performances by both Redford and Nolte, and just about everybody else. They're just there, without much vividness. Redford has no animation; he's just kind of stone-faced, and the gnarly complexion of his age doesn't help. Nolte mutters and grumbles, but very gently. Only Emma Thompson as Bryson's concerned and slightly puzzled wife really seems to believe in her character. Kristen Schaal as the obnoxious fellow-hiker Mary Ellen was a stroke of casting genius, but Schaal doesn't seem to be all that much of an actress, at least not in this movie, nor does the script give her much to do with the character.

The plot basically follows the general outline of the first part of the book, the through-hike (though interrupted in the book) from Georgia to Virginia, but it's very much a warm-hearted buddy movie, editing out both almost all the friction between Bryson and Katz, and also much of the painful rigor of the trail. In the book, the weight of the packs is so burdensome that Katz throws out his favorite foods because he can't stand lugging them any more; the movie is so soft-minded that its Katz carries along a full bottle of whiskey just to prove that he's conquered his alcoholism and doesn't need to drink it. If, as a reader of the book, you were imagining anything with the bite of Sideways, forget it.

There's a few added plot points, like a scene of the most utterly chaste flirting imaginable between Redford and Mary Steenburgen as the owner of a roadside motel (is this a demonstration that a 60-year-old woman can have a sex life, or that she can't?), and one where Bryson and Katz get trapped on a cliff ledge, basically so that they can have a little heart-to-heart about the meaning of life.

Save it for home viewing, but don't expect either a date movie or a party movie. Gorgeous scenery, though: better than the book (Bryson was too focused on slogging through to look up much). The two settings that most impressed me are the vertiginous overlook near the end (it's McAfee Knob in southwest Virginia, which Bryson actually skipped) and the enormous dam the hikers walk across, which I've not seen an identification of.

oh, Mr. Kinsley

I was reading the Sept. 7 issue of The New Yorker while at the gym today, and it struck me as the most New Yorkery issue for a long while, embodying what makes that magazine both unique and sometimes exasperating.

There's the plus ça change editorial quoting Tom Watson in 1910 sounding like Donald Trump. There's the unfunny humor column. There's the long essays on potentially interesting topic (a Palestinian writer who's moved to the US in despair; policing in NYC; the economy of Atlantic City) that go on twice as long as any possible interest I could have in them; but above all is Dan Chiasson's review of a new book of Emerson's poetry.

Let us examine this remarkable document. It begins by discussing in detail the death of Emerson's 5-year-old son, telling for instance of 9-year-old Louisa May Alcott coming over to ask about him, to be told by Emerson, "Child, he is dead." (The boy's name was Waldo, and the article does not record, though it should, that young Louisa's words were "Where's Waldo?")

Then it quotes at perhaps 150 words length from an essay of Emerson's on grief, and then analyzes that for at least as long - remember, this is supposed to be a review of the poetry, and it's gone on for nearly a page without mentioning any - before finally seguing by saying that the essay "has a knife's-edge, emergency intensity that is nowhere to be found in Emerson's poems ..."

Thus not only a huge introduction divorced from the ostensible topics, and the twist which makes the ostensible topic of the article sound a lot less interesting than the one which only operated as a distraction.

The characteristics of New Yorkery were cataloged by Michael Kinsley in a 1984 article on the magazine: the crashing insignificance of the detail, the meandering. Kinsley describes a meeting with William Shawn, its long-time editor.

What, as an editor, did I think of it? Well, I said as tentatively as possible, I thought that some of the articles tended perhaps to go on a bit long ... One function of an editor, I recklessly opined, is to ask while reading a manuscript: "What's the point?"
"Oh, Mr. Kinsley," said Mr. Shawn piteously. He looked deeply wounded, as if I'd taken this thing called "the point" and run him through with it. Okay, so he didn't. I exaggerate. A bit.

Mr. Shawn is long gone, but if I knew how to reach Mr. Kinsley - he seems to be writing for a different publication every time I check on him, and has no website of his own - I'd like to inform him that I see that the Shawn spirit he describes lives on.