Redford's 1988 Film Fails Correctly, Not Wrongly

Robert Redford's 1988 adaptation of The Milagro Beanfield War is underrated because critics failed to recognize the intelligence in its direction, Scout Tafoya argues in his Unloved series.

The film follows a poor New Mexico farmer who illegally diverts water to irrigate a small plot of land, sparking resistance against a corporate development scheme. Tafoya's point is sound on the surface. Redford demonstrates control over tone, manages an ensemble cast, and constructs sequences with visual clarity.

But the problem emerges when you ask what the film actually attempts and why it fails at that attempt. The Milagro Beanfield War was built as a populist fable. A work meant to generate anger at systems that extract resources from the powerless and distribute them to the wealthy.

David Nichols' source novel made this explicit through magical realism and anarchic comedy that treated development machinery as absurd. Redford's version strips away the anarchism and softens the anger into something warmer and more human. The cinematography lush, the folk-inflected score consoling, Chick Eastwood fundamentally likable rather than combative. Each directorial choice moves the film toward prestige drama about individual conscience and away from structural critique. This isn't a blind spot — it's the film caught between two projects it cannot reconcile.

Every choice he made sharpened the central problem rather than solved it.

A director working in 1988, especially one with Redford's institutional position, faced a real constraint. American cinema had no form for genuinely angry populist storytelling that wasn't either genre entertainment or earnest didacticism. Redford chose the prestige humanist register because that's where artistic credibility lived. The film's neglect wasn't a critical mistake. It was the correct response to an attempt that couldn't survive its own contradictions intact.