A gentle snore on the subject of two Montana brothers raised by a Presbyterian minister to reverence fly-fishing and God but fly-fishing more. Like the prior two movies that Robert Redford elected to direct and not to appear in -- Ordinary People and The Milagro Beanfield War -- this one is taken from a literary work that captured his fancy, in this case something closer to James Ivory's corner of the library. Though originally published in 1976, the Norman Maclean autobiographical novella is set mainly in the 1920s, among cars and hats and haircuts that confer on it a "classic" flavor, and it is written in a mesmeric style that might remind you of the rapturous vision of the world of literature which your high-school English teacher tried to open up when introducing you to Leaves of Grass or The Old Man and the Sea. We get to hear quite a bit of the book too, because the voice-over narrator (Redford himself) insists on reading large chunks of it to us, convincing us of nothing so much as the untranslatability of it into a movie. The Montana scenery as photographed by Philippe Rousselot looks lovely (and why wouldn't it?), but Redford cannot do much for the fly-fishing except to gear down to slow-motion whenever a fisherman's wrist goes into its "four-count rhythm." Craig Sheffer, Brad Pitt, Tom Skerritt, Emily Lloyd. (1992) — Duncan Shepherd
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