The Company You Keep: When radicals run out of time (and interesting rhetoric)

At the start of The Company You Keep, newspaper reporter Ben Shepard (Shia LaBeouf) exposes lawyer James Grant (Robert Redford) as a fraud in the wake of the arrest of one of his fellow radicals (Susan Sarandon) and reveals his true identity to be Nicholas Sloan, a member of the Vietnam War protestors the Weather Underground. Nicholas is wanted for murder and a national manhunt ensues. He eventually escapes to Milwaukee where he meets with fellow colleague Donal (Nick Nolte) before sneaking off to Chicago where he consults Jed Lewis (Richard Jenkins), a history professor who has kept in touch with many of the former radicals from their group.

Sloan is convinced that Mimi (Julie Christie) can help clear his name. But he needs to find her first. All the while, he’s got to keep the FBI at bay.  Agent Cornelius (Terrence Howard) is leading the charge to find him and has put a tail on Ben to keep tabs on the young reporter’s findings, even getting a search warrant to go through his apartment at one point.

The film is suspenseful at times, even though the FBI seems particularly inept. While Redford is no Jason Bourne, he capably plays a man on the run from his past. The real problem here is that LaBeouf makes Ben into such as a pushy little prick, it’s hard to sympathize with him, though that’s clearly what Redford, who also directed the film, intended. And there’s something anti-climactic about the ending, too, though Redford deserves credit for not making us sit through a painfully boring courtroom scene as a denouement. The other problem is that the characters just don’t establish meaningful enough relationships with one another. Even Nicholas’s connection with his daughter (who should be his granddaughter, let’s face it) seems like an afterthought in this film— which is based on a book of fiction, even though it seems like a slightly inauthentic non-fiction — that’s just too concerned with pushing a somewhat squishy agenda.