Robert Redford was not necessarily a religious person — at least in any traditional sense.
Though his ancestors were Scottish Presbyterians the actor-director-activist explored Christian Science, Buddhism, Native American spirituality and even the Mormonism of his first wife, but no organized religion appealed to him.
His faith, he told an interviewer with AARP’s magazine in 2011, was “in the power, the energy, that nature puts in place.”
Yet, there is a fierce morality — and even occasional mysticism — that undergirds his films as an actor and director, says director-producer Greg Whiteley.
The Sundance Institute founder and Utah icon “championed the underdog, lifted up voices and causes that were being drowned out, celebrated nature and the environment,” Whiteley says in an interview, “and exposed the hypocrisy of some religious and secular authorities.”
In many films, Redford was “taking dead aim at the hypocrisy of an authority figure,” Whiteley says, “who everyone fears and who ultimately is revealed to be doing more harm than good.”
(Julien James | The New York Times) Filmmaker Greg Whiteley championed the underdog in his movies.
If you spent any time with Redford, says the director of “Cheer,” “America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders,” and “New York Doll,” “you were quickly aware of his suspicion of religious organizations.”
Yet he never reduced those authority figures, Whiteley says, to cardboard characters.
Consider “A River Runs Through It,” the Redford film that directly explores people of traditional faith — a Presbyterian minister and his two sons. The father is stern as he lectures them about their souls and behavior, and worries about the wayward one.
(Columbia Pictures) Director Robert Redford, right, discusses a scene with Brad Pitt and Craig Sheffer in the drama "A River Runs Through It." The father in the film is a Presbyterian preacher.
“Being a religious person,” says Whiteley, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “I appreciate having a religious figure, the father, who isn’t painted with the same broad brush that most Hollywood films would do.”
Indeed, Redford chose to live in Utah, a state dominated by Latter-day Saints, and “obviously had issues with authoritarian churches,” Whiteley says, but he never took cheap shots at them.
The filmmaker spoke at church-owned Brigham Young University, Whiteley says. “He didn’t have to accept those invitations. He was always very kind and generous.”
And it was Redford’s love of independent voices in film that gave Whiteley his career.
At the Sundance Film Festival, Redford awarded “nonscripted films the same level of attention and prominence as any big-name movies,” he says. “I am convinced that if ‘New York Doll’ [Whiteley’s first major documentary film about a rocker who converted to Mormonism] had premiered in any other festival, I would probably be toiling in anonymity.”
Ethical quandaries
One of Redford’s most pointed films was 1994’s “Quiz Show,” which tells the story of cheating during the 1950s “Twenty One” television game show in which the more popular contestant was given answers to the questions in advance.
The show pitted Charles Van Doren, the privileged son of a poet-professor, against Herb Stempel, a working-class Jew from Queens, whose ability to recall trivia was well-earned.
In the movie, Van Doren, the cheater, eventually was exposed and confessed.
“The film is rife with themes of duplicity, betrayal, corruption, the wages of sin, and the shadow under which children of famous parents have to make their way in the world,” Andrew Hidas, writes in a humanities blog. “...It is a morality tale with no clear winners or losers besides the losses Charles suffered himself.”
It is, Whiteley says, a keen example of Redford’s wrestling with such dilemmas, his affection for unlikely and sometimes unlikable characters, and corruption in the heart of institutions.
As an actor, Redford had enough star power to pick his projects, which seemed to fit his vision.
Whiteley points to Redford’s work in “All the President’s Men,” about the Watergate scandal, “Three Days of the Condor,” another tale of government dishonesty and betrayal, and “The Candidate,” which skewers political campaigning.
(Courtesy) Robert Redford, left, and Dustin Hoffman play reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in "All the President's Men," which details the Watergate scandal that led to Richard Nixon's downfall.
(Neal Boenzi | The New York Times) Robert Redford during filming of "Three Days of the Condor," which focused on a corrupt CIA.
‘Magical realism’
In addition to knotty questions of morality, some observers say Redford sometimes showcased mythical elements — especially in sport.
In “The Legend of Bagger Vance,” a mysterious caddie appears to help a golfer win a tournament. Turns out, the caddie is an angel.
“To me, the film best succeeds as a testament to the persistence of mystery, the wonder of the angelic and the blending of the temporal and the spiritual,” David King writes in a Catholic newspaper in Georgia. “Above all, the film affirms the possibility of redemption for those who have faith.”
But Bagger is “full of wisdom and love, and he strikes me as the epitome of what we would like our angels to be,” King writes. “You can’t be a Catholic and not appreciate angels.”
Another Redford-directed movie with an angelic visitor was “The Milagro Beanfield War,” which references Catholic saints and pits Latino workers in New Mexico against a rapacious developer of a vacation retreat in the fight for water rights to the land.
Movie critic Richard Scheib called it “one of the first American films to fall into the Latin American tradition of magical realism. This is a genre that usually involves an earthily naturalistic, often highly romanticized, blend of the supernatural and whimsical."
(Tri-Star Pictures) Robert Redford in "The Natural," a film full of magic and morals.
Then there’s “The Natural,” a sports drama about a gifted baseball player’s rise, fall, redemption and return to the game he loves. His childhood and ultimate love interest is depicted in white and an evil temptress in black. It’s a story of the war between good and evil, mixed with elements of the King Arthur legend, including a miraculous bat — called Wonderboy — fashioned from a tree struck by lightning.
Celebrating humanity
(20th Century Fox | AP file photo) In in this 1969 file photo, actors Robert Redford, left, as the Sundance Kid and Paul Newman as Butch Cassidy appear in this scene from ''Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.'' Moviegoers cheered for these two outlaws in the film.
Redford didn’t write or direct “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” Whiteley says, but it did present a different approach to authority figures.
The film doesn’t expose hypocrisy in the government or religion as much as present the lawmen trying to catch Redford and Newman — in two of their signature roles — as caricatures.
The hunters (“Who are those guys?”) are depicted as mysterious mercenaries, while the hunted are the affable train robbers, exhibiting the joy of friendship and self-deprecation to the end, Whiteley says, and the audience roots for these two antiheroes, hoping they get away.
“They are the moral center of the movie,” he says, “offering quips when they are at their most powerless moment.”
Despite being, you know, thieves, Whiteley says, with a grin in his voice, “they are the people we all want to be.”
And that is Redford’s gift — to see humanity in all kinds of unexpected people and places.
What, Whiteley asks, is more spiritual than that?