High Points: A bright and shining star

Of all the things that suck about getting old, the worst is that you lose friends along the way. And though it is not as painful as losing real friends, you also lose heroes and icons you may never have known but came to admire throughout your life. Such was the case this week for me when I learnt of the passing of Robert Redford, who died at the age of 89.

Now you may not think much about the passing of a movie star. But to me, and millions of others, Redford was so much more than just an actor.

He was the Sundance Kid (“You just keep thinkin’ Butch; it’s what you do best”). He was Hubbell Gardiner in “The Way We Were” (“Things have always come easy for me”). He was Bob Woodward in “All the President’s Men” (“Just follow the money”). He was Denys Finch Hatton in “Out of Africa” (“I mate for life. One day at a time”) and Roy Hobbs in “The Natural” (“My life didn’t turn out the way I expected.”)

Yes, he was a whole cast of characters, each of whom brought the spectrum of human emotion to those who saw the movies he starred in, the characters he brought to life, and the stories he told in the films he directed.

For Christ’s sake, Redford was the Great Gatsby. He was “The Candidate” Bill McKay. He was “The Horse Whisperer.” He took “A Walk in the Woods” as Bill Bryson and created the quintessential version of a mountain man as “Jeremiah Johnson.” Oh, and he was David Chappellet in the best ski film of all time, “Downhill Racer,” written by Aspen’s James Salter.

Perhaps my favorite of his roles was that of Sonny Steele, an aging and occasionally drunken former rodeo star in “The Electric Horseman.” Steele takes an abused $12 million horse named Rising Star out of a casino show and back to the wilds of the Utah desert, prompting a televised search for the horse. Willie Nelson sings throughout the beautifully shot film directed by Sydney Pollack. It is part commentary on current society, part ode to the bygone West, and part love story. There is a scene where Steele rides the horse, decked out in electric lights, down the Las Vegas Strip as Willie sings “Ain’t gonna catch the midnight rider.” If you haven’t seen it, look for it on your favorite streamer.

And that is just a small part of Redford’s contributions to film. Many forget that he won an Academy Award for his directorial debut of the emotional “Ordinary People” with Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore in 1979. He followed that with the fun and inspirational “The Milagro Beanfield War,” starring Rueben Blades as a beleaguered farmer trying to survive in a changing world. Aren’t we all?

Of course, another lasting legacy of Redford’s will live on with each year’s Sundance Film Festival and with the work of the Sundance Institute, which he founded in the Wasatch Mountains in 1980, the year after he won the Academy Award.

The goal of the Sundance Institute, which was based in the shadow of Utah’s Mount Timpanogos, was to provide a place where aspiring filmmakers, actors, and creators could come to work in a nurturing, natural environment to find themselves and produce their best work. Those who have been — and there are thousands — almost unanimously remember their times at Sundance among the best of their lives. Oh, and from 1968 until 2000, Redford built and owned the Sundance Mountain Ski Resort, which became his home for much of his life. He passed away in the mountains he loved.

In 2027, the Sundance Film Festival will move from Park City to Boulder, where he went to college for a short period of time in the 1950s. It is rumored he was a bartender at “The Sink.” It is a fitting full circle that he unfortunately did not live to see.

There is a scene that breaks my heart every time I see it that closes the Redford-directed “A River Runs Through It.” An old man, whose life in Montana was the focus of the film, is on the “big river” fishing by himself. He laments the passing of those who came before and concludes that he can see them in the rocks of the flowing river he fishes. “I am haunted by the waters,” he says.

It is a beautiful final line. I’ll think of it when I think of Bob Redford.