The Company You Keep

The Company You Keep is Robert Redford’s best film since his Oscar winning directorial debut Ordinary People. While certainly not in the same league as that picture, it's a huge improvement over the seven heavy-handed films he directed in the interim. This old-school political thriller is short on thrills, but chock full of political perspective embodied in distinctive, human characters rather than idolized, representational archetypes. The film tells the story of a former member of Weather Underground whose past catches up with him after a fellow 60s activist is arrested for a bank robbery/murder linked to their organization.  The story is based very loosely on real life Weathermen Kathy Boudin, David Gilbert, and Bill Ayers. But there is no mistaking these characters for real people; these are definitely movie characters, which may put some modern audiences off for being too Hollywood.  I, however, like my Hollywood films to feel “Hollywood” and while this film lacks the moral depth of political thrillers from the 1970s (like the Redford pictures All the President’s Men and Three Days of the Condor), it has the well-crafted structure, thought-provoking subtext and powerhouse performances political thrillers and dramas of the ‘80s (like No Way Out and Running on Empty).

The all-star cast Redford has assembled is impressive, but these big names in small roles don’t feel like celebrities doing cameos for a famous director, they come across as complex individuals because of the great dialogue created for them by screenwriter Lem Dobbs (The Limey, Haywire). Many of the famous names on the poster may only get five minutes of screen time, but in those five minutes most of them get to create a rich and complete character. Susan Sarandon, playing the aging 60s radical whose arrest by the FBI incites the film’s story, gets her first role in years that is actually worthy of her talent. Sarandon’s character gives voice to both the moral certainties and the regrets of a generation of radicals and idealists from American’s most politically engaged era. The film is both a meditation on the way values and justifications shift as people age--some convictions become sharper, some less clear--and a contemporary examination of where aging American institutions like government, the press, law enforcement and political activism stand in our current, rather ungrounded time.