Robert Redford’s 1992 film adaptation of Norman Maclean’s 1976 novella, A River Runs Through It, is a cinematic work of literary interpretation. Redford takes no serious departures from the text, allowing the narrator’s authorial voice to animate the work. The film, like the book, is a family story about life. It is not a manual on how to live so much as a study of life’s significance and meaning, even its mystery, and above all, its tragedy. It is also responsible for popularizing fly fishing almost unintentionally.
From an angling perspective, one of the most realistic scenes in the film occurs when Norman returns from his college studies at Dartmouth, a long ways from Montana, and reunites with his younger brother, Paul, on a fishing trip.
The scene begins as Paul walks ahead of his brother and into a good hole. He offers it to Norman, opting for the hole above it, beside a large boulder. Paul hooks a fish before Norman even begins to fish. Paul advises him to roll cast because there is no room for a back cast. A roll cast is a cast where one does not aerialize the line above and behind one’s head, instead anchoring the line to the water in front and rolling the line forward using the surface tension to spring the fly into position. What this cast may lack in visual appeal it gains in practical application for close quarters and tight river banks. It is a humble but effective cast, and the master angler can achieve distance and presentation with it.
At first, Norman struggles. His brother presses him, saying, “The fish are out further.” After a few more casts Paul insists, “just a bit further . . . you’re just a little rusty, that’s all.” Sensing the need for solitude, Paul grabs his leader and moves upstream, letting his brother fish alone. Norman remains frustrated, but refocuses and finds his form. A perfect cast, with a single underhand haul to add acceleration, rolls the line off the soft tip of his bamboo rod and places the fly into the target zone at the right distance; the sequence ends as his dry fly sits on the water naturally before it is taken by a trout and then taken by Norman after a sporting battle.
The fly angler will recognize the struggle and frustration all too well, but also the execution of beautiful roll casts, where droplets of water shed from the line like an arpeggio, glistening with light, forming a dynamic loop and effective delivery.
There is an earlier, boyhood scene that competes with that one in terms of its realistic depiction of actual fly fishing, but it lacks the duration of the later one. Earlier in the film, when the brothers are still boys, we catch a glimpse of Norman and Paul casting side by side. Paul has his leader caught in a tree behind him. Norman looks at him with some exasperation, and Paul smiles back at him.
Apart from the fraternal interaction, there is a bare truth of fly fishing in this scene. Anyone who thinks that fly fishing is graceful poetry in motion may find that eventually, but they will more often be rudely surprised by knots, tangles, and snags. You can get exasperated, like Norman, or just smile through it all like Paul. This scene adds to the later roll casting scene’s lack of foul hooking, or other possible mishaps, and its quiet display of mastery regained.
These two admittedly minor scenes capture the reality of the sport of fly fishing more vividly than most of the others. A possible exception, or addition, to these scenes might also be the moment when Norman witnesses Paul casting to his own beat as an artist, freed from his father’s Presbyterian metronomic casting tempo. There is no denying that the distance and loop formation of those false casts are indeed perfect and possess a style that comes from something beyond technical mastery, verging on expression.
The other aesthetic images of casting are less striking. However graceful a wide, figure-eight loop of line false casting in perfect light may be for its generic visual appeal, a knowing eye recognizes a truer form in the tight loop or the efficient roll cast. Oftentimes, the mark of a great angler is their economy: the lack of extra casting and mending, working through a run with purpose and pace.
The glory of Paul’s final catch, after wading and even swimming through rock and rapid, ends as he holds his trophy by the gills and his father and brother beam with pride. This photogenic scene certainly has epic proportions, but lacks a certain literary depth when isolated from the plot. After all, Paul’s triumph as an angler, on both screen and page, is a foreshadowing of his demise and something closer to consolation than celebration.
Some may find Paul’s great beauty in the physical angling scenes like this one, but perhaps his truer beauty is to be found in his belated morning arrival to fish with his father and brother one last time after a long night of gambling. In many ways, those familial virtues are an important part of the habitus that enabled him to become a great angler and artist. In one of the film’s most astute moments, following this scene, Redford includes Norman’s narrative admission that despite being witness to a great work of art that day, “I knew just as surely and just as clearly that life is not a work of art.”
On the whole, Redford’s rendition of Maclean’s autobiographical fiction is a quiet and faithful work. The director stays well within the novelistic shadow of the written story and its author’s carefully chosen narrative. Paul G. Ryan, the film’s director of photography, notes that Redford would tell him, "Paul, always go back to Maclean’s book . . . The images are in there, deep in the words.”
The score is modest but effective, with dynamics that preserve the sounds of nature. Another realistic consideration is the sheer volume of the river, which often renders speech incomprehensible. The dialogue runs sparse and is understated when compared to the narrated scenes. The only excess, perhaps, is the natural beauty of its landscapes—above all, the river and its light—and the varieties of unspoken love between the main characters.
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There are qualities in A River Runs Through It that resemble and even seem to prefigure Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. The obvious ones include the casting of Brad Pitt, and the aforementioned Ryan, who also worked on Days of Heaven, Malick’s second film, the precursor to The Tree of Life. The plot of a strict father and the loss of a son and brother also consume the plots of both films, along with a romanticism shown through ecological vistas and natural light.
Malick’s film explores the question of life’s significance and meaning at great depth with many of the same insights as Redford’s earlier text. However, Malick’s study has a cosmic scale that includes the history of eternal existence, narrated in biblical proportion. Malick’s characters are also presented more psychologically, with internal thoughts, disputes, and dialogues that often seem dreamlike.
Redford’s subject matter is in many respects the same, but it lacks the vast cosmic and deep psychological scale of Malick’s lengthy, arduous meditation. (One exception to the psychological aspect is also related to fishing: Redford uses close-up shots of sections of water that indicate the intentions of the angler to great effect.) Overall, there is an ease and tranquility in Redford’s cinematic text that Malick’s metaphysical treatise lacks; Redford’s film is wide awake and plain spoken.
Perhaps what ultimately differentiates the two is a certain virtuosic ambition and originality. The Tree of Life may be judged in many ways, but it cannot be seen as lacking ambition or as unoriginal. Even its silences are deafening. A River Runs Through It, by contrast, is short, like the novella it is based on, and Redford is more than happy to defer to the text spoken by a single narrator in a voice that is clear, but quiet in its tone and delivery.
This contrast is by no means a critique of Redford or Malick, and it is intended to highlight why, in my mind, Redford’s classic is so well-loved by the general public and Malick’s epic remains a difficult and challenging text. In many ways, the comparison speaks to other affinities, such as their love of Texas landscapes, which brought them to serve as executive producers of the 2007 documentary, Unfourseen, together. Another overlap between the two films is their profoundly religious character.
Malick’s film is saturated in religious and theological content. It can be interpreted as a commentary on, or inquiry into, the Book of Job. It is filled with moments of transcendence. The most striking one to me is when the mother points to the sky and exclaims, “That’s where God lives!” Along with these moments, Malick carefully works to demonstrate a philosophical distinction of grace and nature as the two ways.
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Redford does not superimpose scripture or philosophical theology upon Maclean’s novella, but he does show reverence for the religious life of the characters. Although it is not explored at the same length or depth, there is a cosmic dimension within the otherwise familial and autobiographical narrative. One does get the sense that the narrator, Norman, is delivering a parable more than a Bildungsroman. On that understanding, Norman, the “preacher” turned English professor—“O merciful professor of poetry and trout,” as his brother calls him—is giving his sermon from the river.
The significance of the river and fly fishing for the film’s gentle, but clear religious sensibility, comes right away in the opening narrative when we learn that fly fishing was nothing short of a religious pursuit in Norman’s formation. “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.” Norman and Paul learned from their father, a Presbyterian minister, that the disciples were fisherman and they imagined all great anglers of Galilee to be fly anglers. They further imagined John, the beloved disciple, to be a dry fly fisherman.
We can quickly grasp the biblical wit of these remarks and can see the earliest portrait of Paul as a kind of beloved disciple in his eventual development as the greatest angler of the family. But it may be more difficult to appreciate the link between fly fishing—and especially dry fly fishing—and spiritual excellence. Within the text of the novella, we witness the most severe contrast from the fly angler in the bait angler: the visiting, urban brother of Norman’s girlfriend. He lacks discipline and interest in fishing and ends up naked, sunburnt, and gone.
To fish a dry fly requires the angler to raise a fish to the surface with a fly that should sit on the water drag-free, moving naturally like an insect on the surface. These flies are tied to dressings that imitate nature by “matching the hatch.” Norman shows this in a scene where he captures a stonefly on his neck and proceeds to tie on a “Bunyan Bug Stonefly Number Two.” Tying dry flies has its own special virtues of sparseness and smallness and requires tackle that is light and supple, with a casting stroke just as sensitive and economical.
Whereas bait anglers toss meat into pools with weights and bobbers, lure anglers throw heavy metal and plastics, and nymphing fly anglers use similar sinking tactics with their flies, the dry fly trout angler will sometimes refuse to cast to a fish that is not rising. It is the height of sport for that region and its most prized game fish. This type of discriminating angler was associated with the beloved disciple, set apart from the best fly anglers of Galilee.
In the film’s opening monologue, this moment of New Testament wit and jest transitions into the first of the film’s profoundly religious bookends, both taken directly from Maclean’s text. The first is spoken by Norman’s father and the last by Norman himself, the narrator. Norman’s ending provides the source for the title of the novella and the film and is worth appreciating for its moving depth and insight. However, it is illuminated and even troubled by the opening. I will quote them in full below:
Long ago, rain fell on mud and became rock. Half a billion years ago. But even before that, beneath the rocks are the words of God. Listen.
Eventually, all things merge into one and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words and some of the words are theirs.
These two quotes, read side by side, track the development of the spirit of the novella and the film and also lay bare certain irreconcilable differences that Maclean explores and discloses in his familial fiction. Perhaps it makes little difference that the context and setting for these remarks is the same river in Montana, the Big Blackfoot, and the same passion for fly fishing, but it does demonstrate just how blurred the line between religion and fly fishing was to the narrator.
Before the film begins, Redford prefaces and then ends the film, just prior to the ending words quoted above, with Norman’s elderly hands tying an Elk Hair Caddis dry fly to his tippet with a turle knot. These aged scenes of the narrator tying a simple knot capture the soul of fly angling best in Redford’s modest masterpiece.
Fly fishing is a lesson in restraint. It is a choice between humility and humiliation. The triumph is less about mastery than it is about self-control. Some of that control wanes as one’s body ages and withers—and some of it remains to be written and hidden beneath the rocks. The final words of the film, like the book, speak from and to the heart: “I am haunted by waters.”
