The Company You Keep, Robert Redford‘s ninth film as a director, is about secrets, principles and the melting value of absolutes. In dramatizing the present-day, assumed-identity circumstances of a group of former anti-Vietnam War radicals who in real life in the 1960s and ’70s advocated the overthrow of the United States government, it offers up a decidedly American story of graying moral certitude to match graying temples. If that sounds interesting, in a certain stage-crafted throwback fashion, it is. If that also sounds like it has the potential to be overly schematic, and turn into a parade of Notable Faces, well… it is that as well.



Redford stars in the film too, as public interest lawyer Jim Grant, a recently widowed single father in upstate New York who finds his life of quiet, ordered domesticity upset when Sharon Solarz (Susan Sarandon), a former radical fugitive having lived for decades as a housewife and mother, is arrested just prior to planning to turn herself in. With a strident federal agent (Terrence Howard) looking to shake the cold-case trees and roust old colleagues of Sharon’s who are still wanted on a murder charge for an act of protest gone wrong, Jim rightly senses his past may be about to catch up with him. Stashing his daughter with his brother Daniel (Chris Cooper), Jim flees.

Meanwhile, beaten to the initial story scoop, Ben Shepard (Shia LaBeouf), a brash young newspaper reporter eager to make a name for himself, starts plumbing his own set of contacts and digging into Grant’s past, which in turn unwittingly abets the FBI’s investigation. Working a scattered network of his old Weather Underground comrades (including Nick Nolte and Richard Jenkins), Jim tries to track down old girlfriend Mimi Lurie (Julie Christie), whom he believes will be able to exonerate him personally, and help him keep his daughter.

In collapsing the disparate viewpoints of a lot of different aging radicals and battered idealists into a streamlined dramatic vehicle, screenwriter Lem Dobbs, working from the novel of the same name by Neil Gordon, crafts a number of solid, morally inquisitive exchanges. There’s a real push and pull here; tough, honest questions are asked (where does complicity end, for instance, and can good acts outweigh a past transgression?), for which there are frequently no easy, pat answers.

The film’s framing device works a bit less successfully, though, as person after person who has no particular compelling reason to talk openly or honestly to Ben continues to do so. LaBeouf has a squirrelly persistence that tracks well with Ben’s indefatigability. It’s just that parties who’ve kept secrets for decades seem somehow checkmated by a cocky assurance and a couple crackerjack investigative moves.

The procession of recognizable actors and actresses — almost all dialed in, and punching out smart dialogue that defends their life choices — is what gives Redford’s movie its hold. There’s a lot to like here, but at the same time some performers are given so little to do that a longer treatment, perhaps even on stage, often feels like it would be a better servicing of the same material. Abdicating, especially in its conclusion, any cathartic punch of shown change, The Company You Keep spins a tale about heavy, universal issues — the weight of guilt, the shadows of regret and the shelf life of swallowed confidence. Would that all its pieces just fit together a little more precisely. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 125 minutes)

In conversation with a colleague recently, the subject of Stephen Dorff came up. With Dorff’s recent electronic-cigarette ads, his steady stream of light-lift, scruffy-faced straight-to-video roles and reputation for an offscreen life of, ahem, considerable enjoyment, he’s like the actor equivalent of a 1980s-era hair metal band that never packed it in, I opined. He’s an unapologetically dick-swinging actor — just livin’ the ring-a-ding dream, baby.



Despite cheap shots many might take, it’s not that Dorff doesn’t have talent, and isn’t capable of restrained work (see Somewhere) or even some interesting excess (um, see Shadowboxer). In the new Tomorrow You’re Gone, however, he assumes a series of increasingly empty noir postures and grimaces, expediting the plunge into frustrating pointlessness of this curious psychological drama.

Not that he’s the only one to blame — adapted by Matthew F. Jones from his own novel Boot Tracks, Tomorrow You’re Gone arrives the subject of considerable offscreen drama. A lawsuit by the author seeking, among other things, an injunction against its release accuses director David Jacobson (Down in the Valley) of sullying his work beyond redemption. So… who’s the chief culprit? It’s hard to say, and even harder to really care about, given the level of overwhelming indifference the movie engenders.

Out of jail after a four-year stint, Charlie (Dorff) gets set up in a dungy apartment courtesy of a shadowy contact/ex-colleague known as the Buddha (Willem Dafoe), who also tasks him with killing someone. Charlie promptly meets a woman with gold shoes on a city bus, Florence (Michelle Monaghan, cycling through a set of fairly beguiling if always symbolic emotional markers), and tells her his name is Samson. She’s an ex-adult film actress, and wouldn’t mind helping Charlie relieve some stress, but he’s all for car shopping and chaste dinner dates, which “keeps his head clear” and leaves him with more free time to mosey off to another neighborhood and do this killing. The additional rub? It’s clear Charlie is not of completely sound mind, and that his interactions with others may represent some sort of fractured reality.

Jacobson delivers a nice technical package, aided by some moody music from Peter Sallet. His composition and framing sometimes suggests Charlie stepping out of body and almost watching himself, which is interesting. But there’s simply no hook or appealing tension to this movie as it unfolds, only counterbalanced scenes of Dorff’s gruffness and Monaghan’s pinprick flirtations. Tomorrow You’re Gone is a muddled game of hardboiled pattycake that I’m certain even all the participants themselves would admit doesn’t convincingly or satisfyingly sell an absorbing story or point-of-view. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Image, R, 91 minutes)