By Witney Seibold
Copyright slashfilm
Redford made multiple, pointed political thrillers in his career, each one with a distinct anti-corruption message. Gunn would like you to watch at least three of them. Michael Richie’s 1972 film “The Candidate” follows a left-wing, plain-spoken politician named McKay (Redford) who is selected by some party wonks to run against a popular Republican in an upcoming election. On the road, McKay finds himself having to compromise his principles more and more until he doesn’t speak for anything. Of course, Gunn is also fond of Alan J. Pakula’s 1974 thriller “All the President’s Men,” which tracks Bob Woodward (Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman), the reporters who cracked the Watergate scandal. Everyone loves that film. It’s fluffier in comparison, but Gunn also likes “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” a superhero flick about the title hero finding that the U.S. government has been secretly infiltrated by a cabal of super-Nazis.
The most obscure film on Gunn’s list is probably the 1980 prison drama “Brubaker,” directed by Stuart Rosenberg. Redford plays the title character, Henry Brubaker, a prison warden who goes undercover as a prisoner to investigate the corruption and horrors inside a typical American penal institution. What he finds is shocking. Fighting the corrupt prison system nearly breaks him.
Several of Redford’s films were very bleak, as symbolized by the title of the 2013 J.C. Chandor film “All is Lost.” Told nearly completely without dialogue, it tells the story of a nameless sailor (credited only as “Our Man”) who runs into a long series of sailing mishaps while out by himself on the sea.
Also bleak is “Ordinary People,” the only one of Redford’s directorial efforts that Gunn recommends. Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore play an upper-middle-class suburban couple who are reeling from the recent death of their teenage son. Their other son (Timothy Hutton) also recently tried to take his own life and spent a spell in a mental institution. The pain, Redford notes, is painfully ordinary.
