When Robert Redford passed and I was asked to put together a tribute to this great man, it occurred to me that I was saying goodbye to someone, too. Someone who put his energy not into preserving the land or patronizing the arts or helping with political causes, but into his family. In his own way. Redford’s directorial career was less than respectable, on the whole, but he made a movie that spoke to a man who came from nothing and died away from the land on which he was raised, so far from whatever home might have been.
My grandfather died a few weeks ago. When I was small, I couldn’t imagine having a different relationship to him than the one I had, of course. He was our playmate, coordinator of our vacations, Santa Claus, our loudest supporter at little league sports, he believed in us. He did everything for us. That’s not the whole story, of course, and right around the time that I learned that this very generous man may have a darker side, he became my employer. I had a front row seat to the disorder I didn’t know had a name or a cause when I was younger. Just why was this man so angry? He rarely took it out on my siblings, but certainly as we aged his disappointment at so many things became unavoidable, in his every sigh, in his response to every broken air conditioning unit or internet problem. After a while the most jovial man I knew growing up seemed aware he’d been left behind by everything he thought he’d conquered. He wanted to be a big wheel, wherever he was, whatever he did. Unfortunately, he wasn’t born that way, and those of us who desire wealth above all will find a way to it, but once you get it, once you prove your past self wrong, what then?
I’m not sure my grandfather ever found out as he never stopped trying to succeed, even though by most rubrics he had. Still, there was some awful poetic circuitousness to the miserable fact that when he passed it was without his beloved wife by his side, without his friends, who he couldn’t see when he couldn’t walk to play golf or breathe in the heat of the summer, without the home he sold to afford palliative care, without much of anything. I thought about all of my memories with him, in the house that seemed so big to me as a child, watching the few VHS tapes he bought for us for nights we stayed with them while our parents were out or away.
He steered towards films about Spanish or Mexican people. He was born to abject poverty in the Southwest, and though he worked hard to rise above it and forget it, it always lived with him. For years he would tell me his favourite film was “The Milagro Beanfield War”. When I was a kid it sounded boring. When I was older I couldn’t bring myself to watch something personal to him. By then our relationship had changed. I knew too much about him. What if I saw the film and it didn’t reflect this man at all? What if it changed my estimation of him, after so many changes had already taken place over a long two decades from the time I sat in his office, doing the work of ten people as his business went under, learning to see his optimism as a hollow front for terror at his own powerlessness. This man thought he could reach the top of the world, but somewhere he still some himself in the image of the dirt poor farming community in Robert Redford’s charming character study, a gently socialist fable about direct political action. I saw everything good in him, and suddenly the year we spent watching him get sick and die hurt that much more.
He loved this movie because he wanted to love people, but he had a hard time extending the love he was denied to many other people. We got it, though. Me and my siblings. The last thing he did for me was finance my next movie. He died before I could show it to him, but we did show him “The Milagro Beanfield War” one last time. I hope it made him feel less alone. I hope it meant something. Now I start a new chapter, with this movie and without him.
