He even spouts details of Bryson’s biography-especially his two-decade residence in England-as if the writer were a fugitive or an anti-American expatriate. It’s the perfect response to this wrong-way raconteur (played with gusto by Randall Newsome), who devalues Bryson’s travel writing by quoting Noel Coward song lyrics (“Why do the wrong people travel, travel, travel / When the right people stay back home?”).

Redford long ago mastered a witty version of appearing dumbstruck. He’s confronted with the kind of interviewer who mistakenly thinks he deserves to be the center of attention as an ace conversationalist. If the script had siphoned more of Bryson’s wry observations into “Bryson,” and if the director, Ken Kwapis, had come up with a richer comic vision of two weathered American males testing themselves against the primordial forest, the movie, unlike Bryson and Katz, might have made it to the finish line.Ī Walk in the Woods starts promisingly, and hilariously, with Bryson hawking a boxed set of his books on Boston television. Redford and Nolte prove to be a fascinating, intermittently funny pairing. Nostalgia, though, might have swamped the fresh material and connected it too closely to the glamorous buddy movies ( Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting) that made them a box-office dream team. It could have been magical to see the reunion of these two old pros and friends. Redford, who is also a producer on A Walk in the Woods, originally hoped Paul Newman would play Katz. Nolte, now 74, is the rascally, out-of-shape, recovering alcoholic “Stephen Katz,” a pseudonym for an on-and-off Bryson pal who dates back to their school days in Des Moines. Redford, now 79, is the movie’s fictionalized Bryson, who was actually 44 when he started the trek.

Watching Robert Redford and Nick Nolte play off each other-sometimes poignantly, sometimes lightheartedly-is the major lure of A Walk in the Woods, a hit-or-miss adaptation of Bill Bryson’s rollicking travel book about hiking bits and pieces of the Appalachian Trail with a ne’er-do-well companion.

Bill bryson a walk in the woods film