Philippa Hawker Writer Bill Bryson was in his late 40s when he published A Walk in the Woods, a memoir of a walk along the Appalachian Trail that he'd undertaken with a friend. This movie adaption features a pair of actors in their late 70s, Robert Redford and Nick Nolte, setting out on the same journey.
Redford, as Bryson, is convincing as a man whose desire to get away from it all seems to be tied to a new impatience with social interactions.
His briskly supportive wife (Emma Thompson) won't hear of his going alone, and insists he find someone to accompany him. The only taker turns out to be someone he hasn't seen for years, whom he parted from acrimoniously: Stephen Katz (Nolte), a shambling, unfit, ill-prepared recovering alcoholic who staggers back into his life with a plan to avoid pressing legal obligations and a bottle of whisky in his luggage.
It's an odd-couple pairing, and they immediately bicker and struggle. Bryson is organised, single-minded, a bit of a know-it-all; Katz is chaos incarnate, cheerfully indifferent to details of all kinds.
Bryson's curmudgeonly streak isn't helped by the encounters they have on the way: Kristen Schaal revels in a cameo as a particularly annoying fellow-hiker they are desperate to evade.
There are a couple of awkward scenes of what pass for romantic interludes: Bryson gets involved in some semi-flirtatious exchanges with Jeannie (Mary Steenburgen), who runs a hostel at one of their stopping points. And Katz arranges to have a drink with a woman he meets in a laundromat, with unfortunate consequences.
Redford has been utterly believable, just recently, as a man against the elements in J. C. Chandor's terrific All Is Lost, when he played a lone yachtsman who finds himself adrift and in danger. In A Walk In The Woods, however, he and Nolte feel like the unlikeliest of hikers and campers: it's hard to believe they'd last more than a couple of days.
Even though the film is a meandering comedy that wants to give us occasional snippets of wisdom about men, mortality, nature and expectations, it needs to feel grounded in something plausible.
And Director Ken Kwapis (The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants) treats this material in a fairly uninspired fashion.
A Walk in the Woods is a rueful admission of limitations and a wry acknowledgement that people will always have things to learn. But this adds up to very little, in the end; the to and fro of dialogue between the men never goes very far, and we don't really get a sense of the natural world that the pair experience.
Sydney Morning Herald
