On demand: "A River Runs Through It"

1992's A River Runs Through It stands as a strong contender for the most handsome film of the Nineties, shot by Philippe Rousselot under the eye of director Robert Redford, and blessed with the young Brad Pitt before the camera, cutting a dash in fine period tailoring. The material is unusual, to say the least: Redford and screenwriter Richard Friedenberg here adapt the academic Norman Maclean's memoir of growing up in rural Montana in the first decades of the 20th century, when the author was caught between, on one hand, the traditions of the church (represented onscreen by Presbyterian preacher father Tom Skerritt, typically terrific) and a swelling passion for flyfishing, presented as an Edenic state of innocence, a suspension of time that gets lost as the years roll on. Craig Sheffer - the Josh Brolin of his day - is Maclean; Pitt his younger, more impulsive and distractible brother Paul; and Emily Lloyd, ascending to Hollywood in the wake of Wish You Were Here, flashes her stocking tops as the flapper who catches the brothers' eyes. Redford himself provides the narration as the older, wiser Norman, suggesting a filmmaker who's fallen head over heels in love with an aspect of this world, formalising his affection for and fascination with an America he was personally too young to have known.

With Maclean (who'd died two years earlier) as his guide, Redford undertakes to recreate and thereby describe a particular, all but disappeared way of American life. There's naturally a certain nostalgia in play: long afternoons with nothing to do save read poetry, write love letters and repair to the nearest riverbank, a church social that involves thick jam sandwiches and banjo-picking. Yet Redford also notes the prejudice levelled at those indigenous folk who come into these golden boys' lives, and a sense (not quite Lynchian, but heading down a similar path) of a dead-end darkness lying around the mountains and beyond the endless cornfields. Not everyone here will get out alive. It's the work of Redford the nature boy (the fishing sequences are ravishing, but even the regulation set-ups have a breeziness and light that banishes anything too stuffy) and Redford the liberal, of Redford the sometime Gatsby and the Redford who made Ordinary People: nobody else would have landed on this material, nobody else would have fallen quite this hard for it, and nobody else would have filmed it this doggedly. If it remains fundamentally episodic - a slightly shapeless patchwork of moods and tones, old-man memories that likely cohered better on the page - it still rings very true on brotherhood and the unknowability of those closest to us, and it leaves behind intriguing questions as well as a warm, fuzzy afterglow. There's much to be said for dancing in the river of life - especially if you do it in the magic hour.

A River Runs Through It is now streaming via Prime Video and the BFI Player.