Listen To This Story

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that nearly all the eulogies for Robert Redford, who died last week at the age of 89, began with his beauty. He was the handsomest of stars — near perfection, a blond god, the man who made women’s pulses race. 

No star shone brighter, the obituaries said, which wasn’t, frankly, necessarily the compliment it might have seemed. To be the brightest star in an impressive galaxy may be no small achievement, but, I think, the encomia underestimated Redford, even as they were of a piece with his life and with that of the America he reflected.

Those obituaries were of a piece with his life because they underestimated him. Redford was always being underestimated. He seemed, said the critics, to coast on his looks. He made it look easy, a natural charmer — which worked to his critical detriment, even if it worked to his advantage on screen. (It reminds me of Cary Grant’s famous comment that it wasn’t easy being Cary Grant, meaning the persona of Cary Grant.) 

Redford was one of the few minimalists in an industry that always rewarded maximalists. He made it look too easy. 

In its obituary, The New York Times’s Brook Barnes quoted critics Pauline Kael, who said of Redford’s performance as Jay Gatsby, that he “couldn’t transcend his immaculate self-absorption,” and Robert Massoco in The New York Review of Books, who quipped that Redford’s Gatsby had “the emotions of a telephone recording from Con Ed” — both of which assessments said much more about the critics’ misunderstanding of Gatsby than about Redford. 

There was, one might say, almost a jealousy of Redford, a resentment of him — of his being too much. Critics had to take him down a peg. They had to puncture his perfection. They even had to deny his craft, as if he was all good looks. 

He was nominated only once for an acting Oscar — for The Sting, one of his lesser performances — and even after he had finally become a Hollywood eminence, the Academy denied him a nomination for All is Lost, his 2013 one-man show about a man lost at sea in a small trawler, which was a brilliant performance by any standard, and one that played not to his otherworldliness but to his mortality.

Redford’s central theme was the betrayal of appearances — the way in which surfaces fool us, lead us astray, even as we are obsessed by them, even as we expend so much of our lives creating and curating them. 

One of the remarkable things about Redford, however, is that he made this underestimation the essential warp and woof of his films. All great stars don’t just shine. All great stars also reify; they bring to all their roles an ongoing theme — a personal metaphor that informs those films, and as often as not gives them their meaning. Their magnetism may be the source of their appeal, but their theme is the source of their artistry, and ultimately, in those instances when it occurs, their greatness.

Redford’s central theme was the betrayal of appearances — the way in which surfaces fool us, lead us astray, even as we are obsessed by them, even as we expend so much of our lives creating and curating them. 

More specifically, Redford understood and deployed the way in which the appearance of things not only hides the depths of things but also distracts us from the deeper moral subtext of things. 

Redford certainly knew whereof he acted. He had lived his theme. His career was an object-lesson in it — in the things we fail to see beneath the things we do see. Or put another way, he was always searching for a larger truth.

That is precisely why, regardless of what one thinks of the merits of the movie, the role of Jay Gatsby is so apt for him: one of American literature’s quintessential characters played by one of America’s quintessential actors. 

Gatsby is the American Dream personified. He is, yes, handsome and rich and charming and enigmatic — a great aesthetic object. He is what many Americans aspire to be, as was Redford, in our dream world. As the book’s narrator, Nick Carraway, describes him, “there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.” This could certainly have described Redford as well. 

But then comes the revelation about Gatsby — that it is a deception — an aesthetic trick, all smoke and mirrors. Gatsby is actually Jimmy Gatz, a rather prosaic man, not so much an expression of the American Dream as a captive of it. The wealth, the polish, the charm, the style are all affectations. There is no underneath underneath, unless you can plumb deep beneath those things. It was down there.

Again, this was as true of Redford himself as of the characters he played. Those looks and that ease were his gift and his grace, but they were also his prison, and, I believe, his anguish. 

Thirty-five years ago, I had the privilege of interviewing Redford at length and spending several days with him for a cover story I wrote for New York Magazine as he was out promoting Havana — incidentally, a movie in which he practically luxuriated in the weathered leather of his skin and in the fact that he had outgrown his youthful handsomeness. 

He told me a story I shall never forget of how he would occasionally stare at himself in the mirror, sometimes for long stretches, not out of narcissism but rather to try to penetrate the image, see beneath it, actually deconstruct it. It was his way of trying to find himself within the image. 

(I should add that Redford phoned me after the piece appeared and was distressed, actually angry, about how I fastened on his looks, even as the theme of the piece was really Redford’s own war with his looks. I should also say that later I would occasionally receive calls from him when he appreciated an article I had written. He was, to say the least, a true gentleman.)

And that is what Robert Redford had always been trying to tell us. Look deeper, Americans.

Though it runs through all his films, nowhere is this theme as explicit or as powerful, in my estimation, as it is in what may be his best movie, certainly the one closest to his “Robert Redfordness,” The Way We Were, in which he and Barbra Streisand co-starred as two very star-crossed lovers who personify the idea of opposites attracting. 

“In a way he was like the country he lived in. Everything came too easily to him.” With those Fitzgeraldian lines does Redford’s character, Hubbell Gardner, seemingly a shallow blond collegiate jock, begin a story for his English class early in the film. And then: “But at least he knew it.” 

That extraordinary opening opens the eyes of a fellow student and aspiring writer, Streisand’s politically-driven lefty Katie Morosky — opens them to the astonishment that there is actually something underneath the frat-boy façade — and ultimately leads to her falling in love with him. Not because everything comes too easily, but because he has the perspicacity to know it, which is integral to his very real talent. 

One could say the same thing about why we fall in love with Redford. You can’t have the love — or the talent — without the self-knowledge. Otherwise, he is just a narcissist, and Kael’s criticism notwithstanding, Robert Redford was never a narcissist. Quite the opposite. If anything, he is self-deprecating and even self-effacing. That famous smile of his isn’t the smile of overweening confidence or self-satisfaction. It is a bashful smile — the smile of self-appraisal and near-embarrassment. 

In short, we love Redford not because he is beautiful but because he realizes how insignificant that beauty is. Of how many stars can that be said?

Adapted, with permission, from Neal Gabler’s substack, Farewell, America.