Movie Review: "The Company You Keep"

"The Company You Keep": B-.  The setup for The Company You Keep has almost unlimited upside potential. Opening with black and white actual film footage of network news legendary anchors like ABC's Frank Reynolds and NBC's John Chancellor, the movie viewers are briefed on the '60's activists called the Weathermen, an underground organization which started as an anti-Viet Nam War protest group and expanded into a radical anti-government organization. Their operations turned to infamy when they shot and killed a security guard during a bank heist in Michigan. Those members of the Weathermen who were not apprehended escaped to various parts of the country and created new lives for themselves, out of the limelight but still in public view as ordinary members of society. More than thirty years later, the FBI has not given up the chase. Things happen in a hurry when one morning they descend upon Sharon Solarz (Susan Sarandon), a housewife and mother, as she is filling her car with gas in rural New York. Solarz, who had been living under an assumed name, was in the Weathermen gang. Now, she is charged with murder. (Minnesotans might think of the almost identical real life case of Sara Jane Olson, a "soccer mom" living in St. Paul who, it turned out, was in fact Kathleen Soliah, a member of the violent Symbionese Liberation Army and wanted for a 1975 murder.  The FBI finally caught up with her in 1999.)

Ben Shepard (Shia LaBeouf) is a wet-behind-the-ears reporter for the Albany Sun Times. His crusty editor (Stanley Tucci) is constantly on his case to break some hard news before the competition gets the glory. Shepard decides to nose around City Hall to find out what nuggets of information surrounding the Solarz case he might be able to use as a lead. He has an on-again off-again girl friend (Anna Kendrick) who works for the FBI and who begrudgingly feeds him some information which, eventually, leads him to widowed Albany attorney Jim Grant (Robert Redford). When Grant realizes that his true identity as Nick Sloan, another former Weathermen member, is on the verge of being exposed, either by Shepard or by the newly energized FBI, he hustles his eleven year old daughter (Jackie Evancho) into his car in the middle of the night and begins the next stage of his life as a fugitive on the run. Shepard is never far behind.

The odds are stacked against Sloan, with both the reporter and the Feds on his trail. But something gnaws at Shepard. Sloan is not acting like a man trying to disappear. If he were, he would have kept his daughter with him on the lam instead of arranging for his brother to become her legal custodian. Shepard correctly surmises that what Sloan is after is proof that he is not guilty of the security guard murder. The key to unlocking that proof is testimony from yet another Weathermen fugitive, Mimi Lurie (Julie Christie). Will Sloan ever find Mimi, whose last known whereabouts was in California, and even if he does, will she sacrifice her own freedom for the sake of telling the truth about Sloan, i.e., that he was not among the masked gang members who robbed the bank on that fateful day?

In spite of the promising beginning and the presence of such acting stalwarts as Redford and Christie, this movie never achieves that lofty potential to which I referred. There are three predominating reasons for this failure. First, the plot's checkpoints take far too long to develop. While on the run, Sloan needs the help of three people from his past, besides Mimi. He needs his brother (Chris Cooper) to take care of his daughter, he needs a fellow former Weatherman (Nick Nolte) who now runs a dockside business to get him a car, and he needs another ex-Weatherman who is now a college professor (Richard Jenkins) to get a West Coast phone number for him so he can track down Mimi. Each of these scenes takes ten or fifteen minutes, which is too much time spent to advance the story just a wee bit. They are also repetitive, as each of those three men initially resents Sloan getting him involved in Sloan's predicament, yet they eventually do what's asked of them. Second, no matter how flimsy any clue might be, Shepard is able to make hay with it. There are no red herrings; he strikes it rich with every hunch. Even Sherlock Holmes didn't bat a thousand, but young Mr. Shepard does. How is it that this cub reporter with limited resources is so brilliant that he figures things out before the FBI? Third, the movie is devoid of humor, unless you count the sophomoric lines Shepard uses in his weak attempts to impress young women. More than once I thought of the 1993 movie, The Fugitive. The Company You Keep could have used a Tommy Lee Jones/Lieutenant Gerard brand of sarcastic wit among the pursuers. Instead, Terrence Howard, who plays the FBI's top dick, merely goes through the motions and utters bland cliched lines like, "Let's get to work, people." There are other nits, including a head scratching surprise connection one of the characters has with Sloan and Mimi's past, but my point has already been made. The film is entertaining, and the disappointment comes only from thinking about what might have been. Unfortunately, with the slow pace, there is plenty of time to think.

There is one outstanding scene in the movie which takes place in the jail after Solarz has asked to see Shepard. Speaking "on the record," with Shepard's recorder on the table in front of her, Solarz explains how she got involved in the Weatherground movement as a young idealistic woman back in the sixties, and how the group's distrust of, and eventual hatred for, the perceived dishonest and corrupt federal government led them to acts of violence. The intervening decades have not much mellowed Solarz. This "everyday housewife" still harbors the passion she held as a young revolutionary. In her eyes the cause is still there. Sarandan does not have a large role in the movie, but that scene is the one I'll remember.