A WALK IN THE WOODS
DIRECTOR: Ken Kwapis
CAST: Robert Redford, Nick Nolte, Emma Thompson, Mary Steenburgen, Nick Offerman and Kristen Schaal
CLASSIFICATION: 10 LS
RUNNING TIME: 104 minutes
RATING: 2 stars (out of 5)
Stephanie Merry
When Bill Bryson’s travelogue A Walk in the Woods came out in 1998, it landed almost instantly on the New York Times bestseller list. The word of mouth was epidemic: This book is hilarious.
Now that the account of two mismatched galoots attempting to hike the Appalachian Trail is a movie directed by Ken Kwapis, “hilarious” isn’t the first word that comes to mind. Cute, maybe. Or pleasant. But you won’t have to worry about laughing so hard you snort, which was a legitimate concern for anyone reading Bryson’s prose in public.
Robert Redford, who has been trying to get this movie made for a decade, stars as Bryson. The Bill of the movie is mildly misanthropic, the kind of guy who will do anything to avoid awkward small talk – even if it means disappearing into the forest for five months.
His wife Catherine (Emma Thompson) thinks this is a terrible idea and starts printing out articles about hikers who were killed along the trail, which stretches for more than 2 000 miles (3 200km) between Georgia and Maine. (In a nice touch, when Bill reads the stories, we hear them in Catherine’s hectoring voice.) When she doesn’t succeed in stopping her husband, Catherine insists he find a travel companion.
That is how he ends up reuniting with the brash, bumbling Stephen Katz (Nick Nolte), a childhood friend. The pair haven’t spoken in decades – so much for avoiding small talk.
Where Bill is a trim family man with many professional accolades, Katz, as he is known, has had a harder life, leaving him dishevelled and bear-like. He explains that he spent most of the intervening decades sleeping around and getting drunk (and, presumably, smoking, judging by his nails-on-a-chalkboard voice). He’s also, incidentally, on the run after a drunken-driving offence. This set-up lays the foundation for an odd-couple dynamic, but the bickering never really kicks in. As it turns out, the old friends have a similar sense of humour, constantly dishing out sarcastic gibes – only some of which land well.
The trail doesn’t offer much in the way of drama, other than a couple of huge bears. They’re an opportunity for a visual joke as the men stand up with their tents on their heads, trying to look intimidating. A few other eccentric characters cross their path, including Kristen Schaal as an irritatingly judgmental authority on all things trail-related.
Mostly, the men just amble along without so much as a blister, wheezing their way through a low-stakes journey that they’re free to quit at any time.
In the book, Bryson would occasionally go on delightful tangents about the history of the trail or certain types of trees, and Redford’s incarnation does that, too. Here, however, it feels less organic, as Bill gives a bored-looking Katz a lesson in American chestnuts.
Kwapis’s direction can be maddening at times. Camera angles tend to show either too much or too little visual information, making it difficult to tell what exactly is happening and, at times, blunting the impact of a visual gag.
For a moment, the movie tries to be about something deeper – some existential epiphany, perhaps. The book didn’t deal in platitudes. It was content to be lightly educational, but mostly just entertaining. The movie aspires to be more, only to reveal how much less than that it really is. – The Washington Post
If you liked Grumpy Old Men or Stand Up Guys, you will like this.