When this film was first released, some critics called it more a travel commercial for Montana than anything else, since it so lovingly handles the scenes of the family members involved in the sacrament of fly-fishing. For those of us who fell in love with the original novel celebrating the ways in which the fishing proclivities of these two brothers framed the outlines of a wonderful story about coming of age, and the tragedy of personal misdirection, this film adaptation by Robert Redford strikes a responsive chord. As he did in "the Natural' and also in "The Horse Whisperer", Redford uses the staggering beauty of the natural environment to emphasize in boldface the ways in which each of us makes decisions as to how to conduct ourselves in ways that either foster our own development and growth, on the one hand, or to take a more sinister route, on the other.