The Company You Keep

Movie / Show Details

Amazon.com

Robert Redford brings his weathered but still shimmering charisma to The Company You Keep. Redford (who also directed) plays Nick Sloan, a ’60s radical gone underground after being accused of murder. When his identity is revealed by cynical muckraking reporter Ben Shepard (Shia LaBeouf), Sloan vanishes again. But this time, something makes Shepard think that Sloan isn’t seeking a new identity… he’s seeking to prove his innocence. The Company You Keep is ridiculously star studded–the supporting cast includes older superstars like Julie Christie and Nick Nolte; established character actors like Chris Cooper, Stanley Tucci, Richard Jenkins, Stephen Root, and Brendan Gleeson; and rising younger actors like Terrence Howard, Anna Kendrick, and Brit Marling. Mostly these are brief appearances, almost cameos, though Susan Sarandon makes her one scene, as another former radical who’s turning herself in, shine. Unfortunately, all this star power only serves to make the pedestrian script even less interesting than it already is. The movie aspires to be a thinking person’s thriller, but there’s no suspense; no one will actually think that Redford might be guilty, or that LaBeouf won’t turn out to have a heart after all. The “issues”–whether violence is ever justified, among other quandaries–are trotted out so perfunctorily that it’s hard to tell if the movie is just being glib or if it’s so convinced of its moral stance that it doesn’t need to convince the audience, or even let the audience know what that stance is. –Bret Fetzer

Product Description

Grant’s (Robert Redford) world is turned upside down, when a brash young reporter Ben Shepard (Shia LaBeouf) exposes his true identity as a former 1970s antiwar radical fugitive wanted for murder.