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Saturday, April 6, 2013

The Company You Keep (2013)

A former radical member (Susan Sarandon) of a militant underground group from the early 70s that was responsible for a bank robbery and the murder of a guard, who under a different identity has been living the quiet life of a housewife for the last 30 years, is arrested by the FBI. Her arrest and the subsequent investigation by an ambitious young journalist (Shia LeBeouf) causes a domino effect with consequences for both the innocent and the "guilty". The director Robert Redford, who also plays the leading character (a lawyer outed as a former underground member who goes on the run), seems to want to play both sides of the fence. At times the film seems like an apology for the radicalism that hurt as much as it did good but it also stands defiant that they were in the right. It would have been better if it didn't sit on the fence and took a point of view one way or another. Yet to be fair, the film delves into the complexities of the era where everything seemed black and white at the time and only in retrospect, do we see the gray. If Redford's flawless character seems too good to be true, the other characters are given more shading and thus more interesting to us. The film seems on target for most of the way but near the end when there was a pivotal scene with Julie Christie (as another radical) sailing on a lake, I had an ominous feeling and thought, "Please end the film here! Please!". Alas, it didn't and the mawkish ending we're fed demeans everything good that came before it. The cast is stellar though: Nick Nolte, Chris Cooper, Terrence Howard, Brendan Gleeson, Stanley Tucci, Sam Elliott, Anna Kendrick, Jackie Evancho and Brit Marling. Based on the novel by Neil Gordon.

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