The Company You Keep

The last shot of Robert Redford’s The Company You Keep is a long view of the hero Nick Sloan (Redford) reuniting with his 11-year-old daughter and explaining how he had to run away to clear up a 30-year-old charge that --  as a radical in the Weather Underground -- he murdered a security guard in a bank robbery. The two stand between two lines of trees, in a quiet enclave beside the rush of traffic. We see him explaining and her reacting but we don’t hear a word. Of course the explanation would be redundant. We know it from the action. But prolonging that unheard conversation confirms the film’s respect for privacy.

Two characters grow up through the course of the film. The first is the young reporter Ben Shepard (Shia LaBeouf). In a clear echo of Redford’s role as Bob Woodward in All the President’s Men, the journalist’s investigation uncovers sensational secrets. Climactically, Shepard learns from Sloan’s advice that for a journalist as for a true revolutionary it is vital to understand your motive. So the journalist who has stomped on Sloan’s brother’s privacy and embarrassed his FBI agent ex-girlfriend kills his expose of the retired sheriff’s adopted daughter’s real parents. This salutary reticence may be an implicit criticism of Woodward's self-aggrandizement after his Watergate triumph.

The second is Mimi Lurie (Julie Christie), the actress reviving her persona as the dream girl of freedom from her debut, Billy Liar, on through Darling, Tess and Don't Look Now. Unlike the now domesticated rebels, Mimi still fights the system -- though now her idealism is reduced to smuggling drugs. That undermines her claim that the present political corruption and violence requires their revolution more than ever. When she decides to turn herself in to save Sloan it’s because she has grown up -- as Sloan hoped she had. She has shaken the simple notion that she has to assert her own liberty and realizes her generation’s overriding responsibility is to their children’s. When Sloan remarks “We’ve become our parents,” that’s a virtue that his younger self would have disdained. Now he understands that the most important objective is to improve the next generation’s life instead of selfishly asserting their own.

That’s also the point in the first rebel who decides to turn herself in, Sharon Solarz (Susan Sarandon). She waited till her children were old enough to understand but not too old ... perhaps, for their relationship to survive serving her sentence.

With the exception of the man who falsely claimed Sloan killed the guard, all the old radicals support each other. Whatever other ideals they have compromised that one remains. Mimi has to relearn that, to save Sloan. The title, of course, is half an adage: You are judged -- because you are influenced -- by the company you keep. 

This is very much an old liberal’s film. Hence the casting of such familiar icons as the leads, Nick Nolte, Richard Jenkins, Sam Elliot, in the radical geezer roles. But the revolution is treated with such a sensible, principled balance that Republicans shouldn’t run out screaming either. Indeed another dramatic instance of its discrete reticence is the omission of the Redford-Christie sex scene. The morning-after scene suggests it may have happened, as the stars' casting perhaps promises. But we don't see it. And what would be Redford's motive to show it?