AT THE MOVIES

With

David Begelman

 

Redford’s “The Company You Keep” or Letting It Slip Away

 

The cast Robert Redford assembled for his 2012 political action thriller “The Company You Keep” is a stellar roster of performing luminaries, by any accounting. They include Susan Sarandon, Julie Christie, Nick Nolte, Chris Cooper, Terrence Howard, Stanley Tucci, Richard Jenkins, Brenden Gleeson, Sam Elliott, and Redford himself as a beleaguered anti-Vietnam War activist, Jim Grant.

Redford’s character, the central figure in the film, is better at eluding the FBI for thirty years than he is at outrunning them when a younger police force is hot on his trail with that bane of the lawless: resolute German shepherds following a spoor. They catch up to him amidst the huffing and puffing he experiences fleeing from the determined arm of the law.

Jim Grant is a widowed father and former Weather Underground militant. He’s getting on in years and is wanted by the authorities for a older bank robbery during which a security guard was murdered. Grant is actually innocent of the charge, and the movie tends to dwell on the ins and outs of the chase and his guiltlessness—as though there were no other important issue to explore. But of course there is, and the film distinguishes itself by the rapidity at which its most important theme is dropped like a hot potato. It is the problem of the sometime clash between the law and individual conscience. Far from being a newer issue, the theme was explored fruitfully in that masterpiece of Greek drama, Sophocles’ Antigone.

The theme is highlighted during the interrogation of Sharon Solarz (Susan Saradon), another former member of the Weather Underground, whose defense of her past political activity remains eloquent and unruffled despite her arrest. She all but flabbergasts those asking for the justification of her lawlessness. These include an ambitious reporter, Ben Shepard (Shia LeBeouf). She turns the tables on him for his direct or silent support of the Vietnam War, pointing out that she, unlike others, took action against policies that even they deemed immoral.

But not so fast. The motif of tension between individual conviction and the law or governmental policy is not so easily resolved by catch-phrases or sound-bites in favor of either. It depends upon the justification of outlook, especially in the light of recent events in Boston. Who can deny that Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his brother Dzhokhar (or Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber) lacked conviction about the principles that drove them to commit the atrocities they perpetrated? The difference between them and Solarz or Grant—aside from the number of innocent lives destroyed—is the difference between ways in which political action is assessed in a moral crucible. Some observers horrified at the schemes of contemporary jihadists hardly blink an eyelash over the nuclear devastation wreaked on innocent women and children during the Nagasaki or Hiroshima bombings of World War II.

“The Company You Keep” drops the ball when it comes to sharpening the issue, principally by letting Grant off the hook for the death of the bank security guard. Not being individually responsible for this, his story becomes a cops-and-robbers chase of an innocent man, who, after all is said and done, goes his merry way. Hardly the searching look at issues we were misled into thinking the movie was initially engaging.

From the purely cinematic standpoint, a scene between Grant and a former activist he joined forces with, Mimi Lurie (Julie Christie), has to be the most drearily tedious one in the film. They meet in a cabin in the woods where Grant tries unsuccessfully to plead belatedly for Mimi’s help in exonerating him.

Notable performances were turned in by Susan Saradon, Shia LaBeouf and the underrated actor Richard Jenkins as a former Weather Underground member who leads the comparatively sedate life of a university history professor reluctant to open old wounds.