If Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon were still with us, A Walk in the Woods could have easily have been a new entry in their ’90s-era Grumpy Old Men franchise, but instead we get Robert Redford and Nick Nolte as aging curmudgeons of very different temperaments who decide against the advice of virtually everyone around them to hike all 2,100 miles of the Appalachian Trail. Redford stars as Bill Bryson, who has recently returned to the United States after living in England for 20 years. Now in his 70s and with retirement over the horizon, he decides to set off on this new adventure, much to the dismay of his concerned, realistic, and ever reliable wife, Catherine (Emma Thompson). Knowing she can’t stop him, she does give him one ultimatum: He can’t do it alone. Unfortunately, after all his friends turn him down, Bill winds up going with Stephen Katz (Nick Nolte), an old travel buddy from his rambunctious youthful years with whom he has not spoken in nearly 40 years. While Bill is the respectable professional, always well groomed and living the good life in his picturesque New Hampshire home, Katz is the burned-out former alcoholic, shambling around on bad legs and speaking in a voice gnarled by decades of cigarette smoke (we can only assume). Not to bring up another Matthau/Lemmon comparison, but they’re essentially The Odd Couple on a six-month hike.

Of course, with that kind of time frame, lots can happen, and a lot does. Like the book, the screenplay by Rick Kerb (a pseudonym for Toy Story 3 scribe Michael Arndt) and Bill Holderman is largely episodic, which keeps the movie ambling along, but without ever developing any real themes or sense of journey. Most of the episodes are of a comic nature, whether it be Katz getting involved with a hefty, amorous local (Susan McPhail) at the Laundromat only to rile the anger of her jealous husband, or the two of them having their camp site invaded by bears. Kristen Schaal shows up briefly as an obnoxious hiker named Mary Ellen whose nasally interactions with them are the very opposite of social grace, but most of the time it is Redford and Nolte alone in the wilderness, trying to prove that those just this side of being octogenarians still have the right stuff.

Unfortunately, A Walk in the Woods never holds together because so much of it is so scattered—unfocused even, as if the filmmakers couldn’t really decide what kind of movie they wanted this to be. Potential narrative threads are dangled and then dropped, including a strange, subtle flirtation between Bill and the proprietress of a hotel/restaurant (Mary Steenburgen) where he and Katz are staying. Enough attention is given to their glances and interactions that they would seem to suggest some level of narrative importance, if only to suggest that Bill is unhappy in his marriage, but nothing ever comes of it and it is quickly dropped.

Redford and Nolte have a good chemistry, though, and it is nice to see Redford, who has chosen primarily serious dramatic roles in the recent years, cutting lose a little bit and playing the straight man to Nolte’s ragged vulgarity. Which brings to me to another issue of tonal oddity, and one that I mention at the risk of sounding like a prude. Although everything about A Walk in the Woods would seem to suggest that it lands in relatively mild PG-rated territory, the movie scatters in just enough vulgar language to qualify it for an R rating. Most of it comes from Katz, who is still randy and unrestrained, although the vulgarities are not consistent enough to define him as a character. Instead, long stretches go by where nothing particularly coarse is said, and then all of a sudden Katz will drop in a couple of not-ready-for-prime-time obscenities. I have nothing against cursing in a film where it makes sense, but every time an F-bomb was dropped or Katz referred to a woman’s genitals with one of their more impolite monikers, it felt jarring and misplaced, something that was also clearly felt by the (mostly older) audience with whom I saw the film. It isn’t immensely damaging, but it is distracting, like the rest of the film’s unevenness.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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