This afternoon at work, I went and helped a colleague deal with a software problem. We use a site online to help share files with clients, and she struggles to use it correctly quite often. We worked through her issue, and when I came back to my desk, I had a moment where I related my experience to a scene from Redford’s “A River Runs Through It”. It can be hard to get help sometimes.

The scene is understated. The narrator, Norman MacLean, after being back east for college, comes home to Montana with its broad spaces and hearty people. He falls in love with a gal named Jessie. They grow close, and one weekend her brother from California, Neal, also known as “Buster”, comes to town- a guy her family lauds as a handsome, cosmopolitan movie star-ish kid, but a guy who, when not pretending to have it all together, in time shows he clearly doesn’t know how to do much in life but drink. Norman and his brother Paul take Neal fishing one morning, reluctantly, at Jessie’s request, and Neal ends up (somehow) falling asleep naked after a good morning drink and getting fried by the strong new day sunlight. Norman and his brother, consummate fishermen, rile inside over his disruption of their consecrated time together in the water, with the sport. When they take a red and wasted Neal back to Jessie after the abbreviated morning excursion, after an initial spell of anger, she is melancholy. Her brother is a mess.

After she and her family have wrapped up the weekend with him, they take him down to the train station to get him on a car headed home. He is prepped out for his ride back to the West Coast, and his family is sad to see him go. Jessie is sad for an additional reason.

At one point she turns to Norman and then she speaks this memorable line.

In a moment of wistful reflection, she asks Norman:

“Why is it the people who need the most help… won’t take it?”

I remember the first time I watched the film closely, when I heard her say that line in a mellow exchange of dialogue, it had the report of a distant rifle shot. I heard the words, and suddenly a moment later, I felt what they meant. They hit home in my own life.

So many times I act a part, like Buster, to cover up what I don’t know, and what I am afraid others might find out I don’t know.

Many people do this, I know. Pretend, instead of get help.

I love that movie quite a bit. I love it for Norman’s deep love for Jessie and her “strange” family (what family isn’t really strange, in reality?). I love it for the big country and the film’s deep reverence for nature and for another day and time.

I also love it for the brothers, because, after all, the film is about two brothers who love each other, but who take different paths in life which separates them from each other. Their instant connection is always recovered when they fish together, no matter how distanced they may be otherwise.

I’ve criedd a lot to this film, because I have a brother, and we’ve always had closeness because we are brothers and we grew up sharing a room, occupying the same space, breeding our private secrets that tied us together. Adulthood came, and our paths diverged. Thankfully, neither one of us took a road that left us indebted, beaten and dead- but the divergence, the separating, was hard. Has always been hard. For me, at least.

I’ve cried a lot watching this movie.

It’s a gift to have a great brother.