An Unfinished Life (2005)

Lasse Hallstrom's An Unfinished Life arrived in 2005 as a neo-Western of the gentlest possible disposition, a Wyoming ranch drama in which Robert Redford glowers at a granddaughter he did not know he had and Morgan Freeman endures a mauling with saintly patience. It is the sort of picture where grief is a physical therapy regimen and forgiveness is scheduled around morphine injections. The film sat on a Miramax shelf for two years before release, which lends the whole enterprise a faintly archival quality, a leftover from a moment when studios still financed quiet adult dramas about weather-beaten men and the women who disturb their routines.

Jennifer Lopez plays Jean, a woman fleeing an abusive boyfriend and scraping together coffee shop wages toward independence. The film takes her predicament seriously without ever announcing a thesis about it. Her suffering is personal, her recovery incremental, and the camera never stops to congratulate anyone for noticing her. Morgan Freeman's Mitch occupies a similar position: a Black man in a nearly all-white Wyoming town, a fact the screenplay declines to examine. His race simply is, unremarked and untheorized. Casting two prominent performers of color in a story with no interest in representation is either admirable restraint or a missed opportunity, depending on one's appetite for the latter.

The bear, mauled and mauling, serves as an ungainly metaphor for grievance that outlives its cause, and the final act asks us to forgive an animal for behaving like an animal. There is a moral here, but it is delivered in a whisper. Hallstrom prefers a warm glance to a sermon, and the result is a picture that means well without insisting we notice. It lost money, won a makeup award, and has been largely forgotten. Some films earn their obscurity.