Movies can become dated in curious ways — especially if they’re left on the shelf for a couple of years.
Case in point: Lasse Hallstrom’s “An Unfinished Life,” which was filmed two and a half years ago but is only now being released as part of Miramax’s late-summer fire sale. The studio is rushing several high-profile pictures into release, including “The Brothers Grimm” and “The Great Raid,” before its divorce from Disney becomes final.
Like those two long-shelved movies, “An Unfinished Life” has a musty quality. It seems to have been created for another era. Perhaps this would have been the case even if it had been released in 2003.
But at least it wouldn’t have carried unfortunate echoes of such recent films as “Million Dollar Baby,” in which Morgan Freeman plays an astonishingly similar role, or “Grizzly Man,” which takes a much more tough-minded approach to man’s interaction with deadly wild animals. For all its attempts at grittiness, Hallstrom’s movie is ultimately quite sentimental.
Adapted from a novel by Mark Spragg (who also wrote the script with his wife, Virginia Korus Spragg), “An Unfinished Life” features Robert Redford in full curmudgeon mode: playing a grumpy Wyoming rancher who discovers that he’s a grandfather when his daughter-in-law (Jennifer Lopez) shows up at the ranch with her young daughter (Becca Gardner).
They’re escaping from her abusive boyfriend (Damian Lewis), who follows them from Iowa to Wyoming, where the grandfather and the local sheriff (Josh Lucas) keep an eye on him. Further complicating the situation are a grieving waitress (Camryn Mannheim) and a marauding bear, which mauled Redford’s favorite ranch hand (Morgan Freeman) so badly that he requires regular morphine shots.
Freeman is very free with advice about how to handle the bear (which has been caged) and about how to deal with the daughter-in-law, who deeply offended Redford many years before. In fact, Freeman’s character comes perilously close to becoming Redford’s Jiminy Cricket; the movie is at its liveliest and most provocative when Redford more or less tells him so.
As a character study, “An Unfinished Life” is certainly watchable. Redford digs into his role and lends it an emotional validity that isn’t always in the script. Even if you guess where the movie is taking this character, Redford’s performance is full of welcome little tics and surprises.
There’s a bond between him and Freeman that allows the actors to play several scenes as if they’re an old married couple. When the granddaughter assumes they’re gay, the old friends may laugh it off, but she’s not wrong about the emotional intimacy of their relationship. It helps that Gardner so delicately balances precocity and honesty in each of her big scenes.
Hallstrom can surely take some credit for these performances, which are the reason to see the film. But he fails to do much with a flirtation between Lucas and Lopez (who never quite gets a fix on her character), and there's little suspense surrounding the gradual revelations of the characters’ big secrets. The result is well-meaning but oddly creaky.