Movie Reviews: "A Walk in the Woods" A Sarcastic, Enthralling Narrative About Nature

Ken Kwapis, the director of A Walk in the Woods, also directed Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and He's Just Not That Into You. I sort of liked He's Just Not That Into You, so this is not a knock on Kwapis' talent as a director; he's clearly more than proficient. However, applying his brand of romantic comedy to a Bill Bryson book is as misguided as it is insulting to poor Bryson (though Bryson, surprisingly, likes the adaptation). The result is an attempt to vacuum seal a sarcastic, enthralling narrative about nature and America into a very run-of-the-mill "Old People Behaving Badly" movie (or "Grandpa's Still Got It Film" as I like to call the Bucket List genre). In doing so, the filmmakers not only aged the characters about 20 years, they abandoned the source material entirely.

Robert Redford plays successful travel writer Bill Bryson who hikes the Appalachian Trail. in real life, Bryson was overweight, 47, and hiked the trail for a major book deal. In the movie he's more like 67, hikes the trail for the experience of it, and looks, well, like Robert Redford. 

Joining Bryson is his long lost friend Katz (Nick Nolte). Nolte is fat, old and alcoholic and seemingly the last person who would ever be able to hike the 2,000 mile Appalachian Trail, which runs from Georgia to Maine. The film is a buddy travel movie, and Bryson and Nolte get into the diet old people version of all the expected antics. At one stop on the way, there's a Sideways-identical subplot featuring Katz, an overweight woman, his overweight husband, and an exit through the back windows of a motel room.

Helping them get equipped at the climbing store is Nick Offerman, clearly enjoying himself in a role with big potential but disappointingly little payoff. Still, once the geriatric duo gets going along the trail, the movie rolls along nicely. Nolte is hilarious as the hard-breathing Katz, and he and Redford have authentic chemistry and banter that hinges mostly on their class differences (Katz is a loser, Bryson a winner). The best part of the film is an annoying hiker named Mary Ellen (a hilarious Kristen Schaal) who travels with Bryson and Katz for a segment of the trail. She passive aggressively criticizes their equipment, calls Katz fat, and constantly hums the most irritating of all possible Pharrell songs. She drives Katz so crazy he wants to "kill her and take her Pop Tarts."

There is the expected entrance of a potential love interest for Bryson played by Mary Steenburgen, who always seems to get stuck playing substanceless love interests for old men behaving badly. It ends with nothing more than a few smiles, as Bryson has a wife back home, an overly British Emma Thompson, who in recent years I have trouble distinguishing from Hugh Grant. There's those damn young people, with their fit bodies and perfect gear kits, offering unwanted help. And there's the perfectly structured cliffhanging climax that has nothing to do with the book or reality.

A Walk in the Woods is not in itself a horrible movie. It's sometimes funny (though not witty), and Nolte, who fits into Katz like a snug old glove, allows himself to be charming. It's not the film I don't like, it's that it ignores everything good about the book. Most bad emotion comes not from events themselves, but from disappointment.

I was as titillated by the book A Walk in the Woods as everyone else is. Bryson is a very engaging writer, and yes he is goofy and cute and highly PG-13, but he wouldn't appeal to so many adult readers if he wasn't also a little deep, a little concerned with the American condition, and a little bitter at bureaucracy. A large portion of the book, for example, is dedicated to an Bryson's bleak visit to Centralia, an environmentally poisoned mining town in Pennsylvania, that includes serious social criticism. Also, when he wrote the book he was only 47, not exactly an restless old man, and while the writing deals somewhat with being old and out of shape, it is far from the main theme. The film version of A Walk in the Woods ignores all the social commentary, and replaces it with human relationships and banter almost entirely about being old. It also glazes over the limits-pushing difficulty of the hike, instead painting it more like a challenging ropes course. It is unfaithful to the book not just in substance, but in theme. It is more concerned with being escapist candy for bored old people than having anything to say.

It left me wondering "Why?" Why adapt a great book if you're just going to hollow it out and replace it with something more marketable? I know the answer, even if I don't want to accept it. The movie business, like the media business, is increasingly title-philic. Producer Broad Green studios took a sure title with an existing following, carved out the insides and replaced it with a genre film it knew would sell. They were right, but not for the reasons they think they were right. Nobody saw this movie because of word of mouth, they saw it because of the trailer, the Redford/Nolte cast, and the Bryson tie-in. These characteristics were a part of the package regardless of the substance of the film itself. There was no reason they couldn't make a serious adaptation of the book, and in failing to do so they only frustrated viewers and bored reviewers.