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The lion king
Published 15 November 2007
With his passion and film-star smile undimmed, Robert Redford still reigns over the Hollywood left. But he is not interested in polemic
"I don't believe in agitpropaganda," says Robert Redford, with reference to his latest film, Lions for Lambs. A heartfelt examination of post-Iraq America, the film has been described by Redford as his most political. It has certainly elicited strong reactions across the US media, varying from the considered to the almost comically hysterical; according to Fox News, Redford "looks like a cross between an old baseball mitt and a dried apple refrigerator magnet. The ultimate consequence of wishing America bad? You lose your looks." Fans may beg to differ. Redford still possesses the ruggedly handsome features that made him famous as the Sundance Kid, and when we meet in London's Dorchester Hotel, he has his light blue shirt half unbuttoned, revealing what, for a 70-year-old grandfather, might be considered a daring expanse of chest.
Lions for Lambs follows a complex web of characters as they negotiate America's contemporary political landscape. A journalist, played by Meryl Streep, is given an exclusive interview by a young hotshot Republican senator (Tom Cruise), which forces her to face up to her own complicity during the build-up to war. An idealistic politics professor, Dr Malley, played by Redford, confronts a bright student about his apathetic attitude. Meanwhile, two of Malley's former students, who took the decision to enlist in the army, are shot down over Afghanistan.
The film is released as one of the first in a batch of Iraq-related films, as discussed by the NS film critic Ryan Gilbey in these pages last week. However, Redford insists that he was not simply jumping on the anti-war bandwagon. "The film uses the issues of today simply as fodder for looking at deeper issues," he says. "It doesn't attempt to provide answers as much as questions." He distinguishes between his own work and that of a polemical documentary-maker. "I have been an activist, but not to the extreme of Michael Moore. I'm not out there slashing away . . . It would be too easy to make a film that was simply saying, smash Bush."
As a young man growing up in a disadvantaged neighbourhood in Santa Monica, Redford had little interest in politics. "Richard Nixon was my state senator and he was so boring," he says. "I thought, if this is what politics is like I don't want any part of it." That all changed during a trip to Europe after he was expelled from school for drunkenness aged 18. "I came to France and had little money so I stayed in a bohemian section of Paris with a lot of other students. They were from medical school and science schools, art schools. We all lived in a kind of communal way and I was challenged politically. I didn't have a clue. They would ask me questions - the Algerian War was going on, it was very big in France at the time, this was the late 1950s - I was humiliated. I was ashamed that I didn't know much about my country's politics. When I came back to America a year and a half later, I was much more focused on my country culturally and politically."
Redford admits that film-makers are finding it easier to criticise the current government now that it is falling from favour with the American public anyway. "The mainstream usually follows trends, it seldom sets them. It's a little easier in my country to be critical of the administration because it has tanked in terms of popularity."
This has not, however, so far translated into high box-office sales for the raft of political films, and it remains to be seen whether Lions for Lambs will buck the trend. Although Redford says he was prepared for the reaction of right-wing bloggers ("they just assume it's a left-wing film, yada yada yada"), even liberal viewers have struggled with its didactic tone. Despite Redford's insistence that it is not an anti-war polemic, each character feels like a vehicle for a particular set of views: the thrusting young Republican hawk, the liberal journalist, the apathetic student. Anthony Lane, the New Yorker's influential film critic, wrote that it "winces with liberal self-chastisement". Certainly, it compares unfavourably with Redford's previous, highly regarded directorial outings - including the Oscar-winning Ordinary People (1980).
It will, however, cement what Redford refers to as his "profile" as one of the leading figures on the Hollywood left. He is revered by some for his social conscience - and his patronage of independent cinema, which he has championed with his annual Sundance Film Festival - and despised by others as a member of the chattering glitterati. He has said that his directorial work is united by the theme of "heart": in Milagro Beanfield War (1988) he looked at the threat posed by developers to historic Chicano cultures, and Quiz Show (1994) examined the moral downfall of American television during the 1950s. Nature and the environment have also been a prominent concern, with A River Runs Through It (1992) and The Horse Whisperer (1998) in particular.
Redford was an early convert to the environmental movement, and talks proudly of having campaigned on it since 1969. "It was not a happy easy time, because those were the days that the oil and gas companies pretty much controlled the show on propaganda. Anyone speaking about solar energy would be smashed down as being a radical, a tree-hugger and granola-cruncher or what have you."
He is notably cynical, however, about Al Gore's recent award of a Nobel Peace Prize. "He's making a lot of money, he's having a belle époque, a heroic moment," he says. "It must have been really hard for Gore to suffer all that [losing the presidential election], so he found another thing to come back with: the environment. He had a lot of money behind him, because in Clinton's administration there was a lot of money. With that he was able to build himself a new campaign and pick an issue. And he picked an issue that just happened to arrive at its moment in time." The less-than-subtle subtext is that Gore is an arriviste, while Redford has been out there, a grizzled loner, bearing the jibes and right-wing clobbering before the environmental cause was fashionable. Asked why he thinks Gore is not going back into politics, he says: "What's most important - to be a hero to your country and go save it . . . or do you want to be happy and rich and be a hero and not get into the political scene?"
Redford dismisses the idea of going into politics himself: "I'm not good at compromise." Neither will he endorse a candidate for the forthcoming presidential election. "I don't get involved on the national stage . . . so far there's not anybody terribly inspiring." Nevertheless, with both his passion and his film-star smile undimmed, Redford seems destined to remain king of liberal Hollywood for years to come.
"Lions for Lambs" is in cinemas now
Redford: the CV
1936 Born in Santa Monica, California to Charles Robert Redford, an accountant for Standard Oil, and Martha W Hart.
1954 Graduates from Van Nuys High School in Los Angeles California, with a baseball scholarship to the University of Colorado. Soon drops out and spends time travelling before moving to New York, where he studies painting and set design.
1962 Makes screen debut in War Hunt, a drama about the last days of the Korean War, which also featured the acting debut of Sydney Pollack.
1969 Plays a charismatic bank-robber alongside Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, his break-out role. The film's success sets off a series of performances in the 1970s in films such as The Way We Were, The Sting, and All the President's Men.
1980 Wins Academy Award for his directorial debut with Ordinary People, a drama about an upper-middle-class family starring Mary Tyler Moore and Donald Sutherland.
1981 Founds the Sundance Institute to support aspiring American film-makers telling original stories. Its annual film festival has become the largest and most influential festival for independent cinema in the US.
2004 Works as executive producer on The Motorcycle Diaries, the coming-of-age film about Che Guevara as he travels across South America on his motorcycle, generating a backlash from conservative critics who chastise Redford as a "Castro apologist".
Claire Provost
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