The Irrepressible Rothbard

February 1993

Directed by Robert Redford

A picture about fly-fishing in Montana? For an urban New York type like myself who wouldn’t know a fly-fisherman from a surfer, who thinks that fish should be caught in giant nets, and who believes that once you’ve seen one mountain or tree, you’ve seen them all? And from someone who had never heard of Norman Maclean, from whose autobiographical sketch this movie was made?

And yet, I found this a wonderful, enchanting movie. I was enthralled by the entire story of an early twentieth-century family in Montana, by the spare, haunting, marvelous narration culled from that book, and by the motion picture which Redford has obviously made totally in the spirit of the story, with no Hollywoodization, and no beating the audience over the head with every point. I loved the Montana river, was enthralled by the mystique and the technical “four-count” perfection of fly-fishing, charmed by the notion that for the narrator’s Presbyterian minister–father it was difficult to draw the line between religion and fly-fishing. I was captivated by the scene where the narrator Norman’s younger brother Paul breaks through his father’s technique to achieve his own innovative and superior form of fly-fishing.

There are many great little touches in this film: the life of the family; the gentle gripe when the father mentions that his reporter son had changed his name to MacLean, with a capital L, making the family look like “lowland Scots.” There is the teasing byplay between Presbyterians and Methodists: “Methodists are Baptists who can read;” “don’t crowd around him, he’s a Presbyterian.”

And of course the total contempt of fly-fishermen for the crude, easy and popular form of “bait-fishing”: “He’s the kind of peckerwood that will show up with a red Hills Brothers can of worms!” And the minister–father stubbornly if erroneously convinced that “St. Peter was a fly-fisherman.”

In addition, Redford’s deliberate choice of excellent but virtually unknown actors insures that the actors could form an ensemble team without the distraction of “star” celebrities.

What can I say? If this New York peckerwood can be enraptured by a movie about Montana fly-fishing, how much more in love with A River Runs Through It will be those readers who have actual experience of these rural delights! For urban and rural viewers alike, not the least of the charms of this movie is that it shows us life as it used to be lived, life in the Old Republic, of the America that we have lost, or rather that has been seized from us. When will the day come when movies as enchanting and as yea-saying can be made about today’s America? The point of the paleo cultural revolution is not to be content with aching nostalgia, but to set out on the long but rewarding path of Bringing America Back, back to Eden.