a little movie

[calimac]

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.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I liked the book, so maybe I'll try this movie when it hits Netflix.

[(Anonymous)]

This book was still the talk of the trail when I thru-hiked in 2000, but I only read it later. Despite all that Bryson missed, I liked it a lot, and was prompted to read a few others of his books. (An instance of his omissions: within a week or two, almost all thru-hikers know their fellows by their trail names rather than their true names. This is a huge part of the trail culture. I remember Sweettooth and Granite and Little Side Track fondly; I would have to dig out my files to recall their real names. As I recall, Bryson never uses the term "trail name", which any thru-hiker would know, and refers to them just once or twice.) McAfee Knob is definitely a (perhaps the) visual highlight of the southern half of the trail; like many such spots, its only a few miles from the nearest road crossing and is visited by many day hikers. I can't say for sure about the dam without having seen the film, but my first guess would be Fontana Dam on the Little Tennessee River, which the trail crosses on its way into Great Smoky Mountain National Park.

-MTD/neb

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Yes, the one person Bryson meets who's known by a trail name doesn't use that term, doesn't like his trail name, and doesn't know why anyone calls him that. And it's way near the end of the book.

I'm not sure what I'd think of repeatedly running into my fellow hikers. When I'm driving, I want other drivers either to get ahead of me or fall behind me, and either way never be seen again, not keep pace or keep turning up. (I get itchy driving in convoys.) I'm not sure how I'd feel about it as a hiker, but at least we'd have something to talk about at the campsites. "Seen a lot of trees today?" "Yup." "Seen any bears?" "Nope."

[(Anonymous)]

Like Bryson, I hiked with an old friend--albeit one with whom I'd regular contact in the ten years since we graduated from high school. At the end of the six months, we could barely stand each other. (We were soon on good terms again; he was with me for our much shorter Newfoundland trek this summer.) As for other hikers, because everyone has their own pace, there were some interesting dynamics.

We shared the shuttle from Atlanta with one other person; he was light of foot, and we never saw him again after the first fifteen minutes on the "approach" trail to the A.T. Of the many others that we met in the first few days, in the large hopeful crowds at the shelters of northern Georgia, some were like that, while others we saw again and again for two months or more, well into northern Virginia. We were always overtaking and being overtaken, because everyone had their stronger and weaker hiking days, or because someone had to stop in a town for supplies, or sometimes because of injuries--for instance, we had a "zero day" at an early shelter to alleviate the huge blisters on my friend's heels.

I believe Bryson at least alludes to the trail journals found at each of the shelters. Through these, we could follow the progress of the faster hikers we had met, as well as get to know something of the personalities of those we were slowly catching up. It was a momentous day when we actually saw an entry being written by "Mossy Old Troll", the literary light of that summer's journals. It was also a sad day, because passing him (near Palmerton, Pennsylvania) meant we'd never get to read any more of his comments.

-MTD/neb