it was always to climb up the hill

NYタイムズの有名コラムニストMaureen Dowdがレッドフォードの最新号について書いていました。レッドフォード一人しか登場しない海上サバイバル劇ですが、早くともアカデミー賞のうわさが出ているようです。

The Sun-Dried Kid
Robert Redford Goes to Sea in ‘All Is Lost’
Robert Redford in Pictures: Images of the actor and his work.
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 9, 2013

He didn’t think about dying while he was making his new movie about it, J. C. Chandor’s melancholy mariner’s tale, “All Is Lost.” He thought about enduring.

“I’m interested in that thing that happens where there’s a breaking point for some people and not for others,” he said over morning coffee recently in the deserted Owl Bar at his resort here. “You go through such hardship, things that are almost impossibly difficult, and there’s no sign that it’s going to get any better, and that’s the point when people quit. But some don’t.”

That’s also what drew him to an earlier story: his 1972 tale about a 19th-century mountain man battling the wild, “Jeremiah Johnson,” shot on Mount Timpanogos where we were sitting.

“You just continue,” Mr. Redford said. “Because that’s all there is to do.”

映画製作の裏話などは実際の記事を読んでいただくとして、“You go through such hardship, things that are almost impossibly difficult, and there’s no sign that it’s going to get any better, and that’s the point when people quit. But some don’t.（体験する苦境が、乗り越えることが出来ないほど困難なもので、好転する兆しが何もなく、普通の人ならあきらめてしまう所まできているものでも、あきらめない人がいるんです）”“You just continue,” Mr. Redford said. “Because that’s all there is to do.（ただ続けるのです。とレッドフォードは語る。そうするしかないんですから）”という部分は英語学習にも励みになりますね。

また、タイトルに使わせていただいた“To me, it was always to climb up the hill,”は記事の最後に登場したのですが、彼のような人が語るからこそ重みが出ますね。

He says he has grown more comfortable in himself as he gets older, and abides by his favorite T. S. Eliot line: “There is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

“To me, it was always to climb up the hill,” said the man sitting on his own mountain. “Not standing at the top.”

NYTの記事でも紹介されていたニューリパブリックの映画評もべた褒めしています。

The Best Film of the Year Has Just One Actor
"All Is Lost": Why Robert Redford deserves an Oscar
BY DAVID THOMSON

All Is Lost is amazing, deeply moving, and a harking back to an age when the best mainstream films might be the best pictures America made. It is an adventure and an epic with one person. I am warning you that it may win Best Picture, and that its one person, Robert Redford, deserves what has never come to him before, an Oscar for best actor.

He plays a man sailing a yacht single-handed 1,700 nautical miles from Sumatra. He is broken out of sleep one morning; there is water slapping around in his cabin. His yacht has been hit by a rogue container, a sinister rust-red oblong, a hideous moribund Moby, loaded with running shoes that are now leaking into the still Indian Ocean. (How many of these beasts lurk in the oceans?) Far worse, the container has put a wound in the side of the yacht. If ever the sea gives up its stillness, the boat will flood. The sailor’s radio has been destroyed. His cell phone is waterlogged. He says nothing, but he knows the peril.

And because he is Robert Redford, he is seventy-six in the film, which is too old and aching for the buffeting of storms. Moreover, this is an old man, denied any of the photographic kindnesses that have made some of Redford’s films too fussy. We never know why this man is far south in the Indian Ocean and 1,700 miles from the closest shore. Is he part of a race? Or is this just an old man’s love of solitude and sailing? We don’t know his personal situation or his family ties. We never learn his name. In the credits he is simply “Our Man.” That is one of many strokes of wisdom in a film directed and written by J.C. Chandor.


また、Esquireの最新号でもレッドフォードの演技を絶賛して以下のように書いて締めていました。

All Is Lost won’t be any sort of box-office blockbuster, but it’s far too good a movie, with too great a performance by Redford, to ignore.

まだまだアカデミー賞は先ですが、楽しみですね。アリスマンローのように取るべき人がとってもいいんじゃないでしょうか。