Review: The Company You Keep (2013)

April 12, 2013 Reviews 1 Comments

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Cast: Robert Redford, Nick Nolte, Stanley Tucci
Director: Robert Redford
Country: USA
Genre: Thriller
Official Trailer: Here

Editor’s Notes: The Company You Keep opened in limited release on April 5th. If you’ve already seen the film we’d love to hear your thoughts on it, or if you’re looking forward to seeing it this weekend, please tell us in the comments section below or in our new Next Projection Forums.

Few directors can claim to have won an Academy Award for Best Director with their first feature-length effort, but actor-director-activist Robert Redford can. His first film Ordinary People won an Oscar for him, and a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Timothy Hutton. It also received nominations in several other categories. For Redford, one of the ‘70s biggest box-office stars, Ordinary People marked a transition from popular mainstream roles to more personal roles acting and/or directing. In hindsight, however, Ordinary People can be seen as a high-water mark for Redford’s directing career. Nothing he’s done in the last three decades has matched that film’s critical acclaim or awards cachet. His latest, The Company You Keep, an adaptation of Neil Gordon’s well-regarded 2003 novel scripted by Lem Dobbs (Haywire, The Score, The Limey, Dark City, Kafka), will do little to change that unfortunate trend.

We don’t meet Redford’s character—Jim Grant, a comfortably upper-middle class Albany attorney—right away. Instead, we meet Sharon Solarz (Susan Sarandon), a suburban housewife with a secret: a long-ago member of the Weather Underground, Sharon was involved in the fatal shooting of a bank guard in Michigan thirty years earlier. While one of her partners was caught, two others weren’t. Sharon, however, has tired of running, of living under an assumed name, but before she can give herself up, the FBI swoops in, arresting her for the bank guard’s murder. While a mutual friend attempts to convince Grant to serve as Sharon’s counsel, he refuses, a decision that piques the interest of a twenty-something reporter for the Albany Sun-Times, Ben Shepard (Shia LaBeouf).

In hindsight, however, Ordinary People can be seen as a high-water mark for Redford’s directing career. Nothing he’s done in the last three decades has matched that film’s critical acclaim or awards cachet.

company3 Like Sharon, Grant didn’t so much go underground as hide in plain sight, obtaining a new identity, going to law school, practicing law privately through his own firm, and late in life, marrying and becoming the widowed father to a young daughter, Isabel (Jackie Evancho). Like countless unseen deceased parents on film, Isabel’s mother died in a car accident. Grant’s fears of exposure prove to be accurate: a persistent Shepard discovers his real identity—Nick Sloan—but Grant goes on the run before Shepard can interview him again. After dropping off Isabel with his younger brother Daniel (Chris Cooper) in Manhattan, Grant goes back underground, hoping to clear his name and resume his place at the upper-middle class table by finding his one-time girlfriend, Mimi Lurie (Julie Christie).

Grant, however, doesn’t so much go on the run as go for a slow jog, with slow-on-the-uptake FBI Agent Cornelius (Terrence Howard),repeatedly missing him. Shepard proves to be better at tracking Grant’s movements than the FBI, a plot element that’s difficult to believe given the FBI’s vast resources, not to mention a minor piece of legislation called the USA Patriot Act. But if we didn’t believe Grant could outsmart the FBI, then The Company You Keep would lose all plausibility. Actually, it does that anyway, with a hide-in-plain-sight Grant casually visiting an old comrade, Donal Fitzgerald (Nick Nolte), who left radical politics for the construction industry, and a former comrade turned college professor, Jed Lewis (Richard Jenkins), extremely uneager to revisit his radical past. Like a pre-outed Grant, Lewis has no interest in politics, just the comforts of tenure at a major educational institution and a comfortable retirement in the near future.

It’s not a critique that Redford tackles with any real seriousness or depth. He’s perfectly content to offer the contrast and then move on…

company4 The contrast between one-time radical activists turned semi-upstanding pillars of the capitalist economy they once abhorred provides The Company You Keep with a potentially fascinating, if unoriginal critique. It’s not a critique that Redford tackles with any real seriousness or depth. He’s perfectly content to offer the contrast and then move on, leaving Mimi as the only character who hasn’t compromised her principles (whether they’re wrongheaded is a topic for another discussion). When Grant and Mimi finally cross paths, their meeting should be freighted with historical import, not just personal meaning. That it’s not, like Redford’s decision to make Grant a decent—if exceedingly dull—character minus any edges or recognizable flaws, is an indictment of Redford’s brand of risk-adverse, bland, ultimately forgettable filmmaking.

Moviegoers, however, won’t forget the relentless stream of cameos by well-known actors and former movie stars, including Oscar winners (Sarandon, Christie, Cooper) and nominees (Nolte, Jenkins, Kendrick, Howard), presumably Redford’s friends or acquaintances. Their presence detracts more than it adds, constantly serving as a distraction both from their limited, usually underwritten roles here and from roles both better and memorable than anything in The Company You Keep. They also won’t forgive the resort to an overused and clichéd third-act plot turn that’s meant to raise the personal stakes for Grant. It doesn’t, if only because we’ve seen it so many times before that we’ve become numb to its emotional and personal implications.

55/100 ~ The Company You Keep is characteristic of Redford’s brand of risk-adverse, bland, ultimately forgettable filmmaking.

By Mel Valentin

Mel Valentin hails from the great state of New Jersey. After attending NYU undergrad (politics and economics double major, religious studies minor) and grad school (law), he made the move, physically, mentally, and spiritually to California, specifically San Francisco. Mel's written more than 1,400 film-related reviews and articles. He's a member of the San Francisco Film Critics Circle.