The Company You Keep (2012)

The Company You Keep arrives with a cast list that reads like a reunion of the Screen Actors Guild's most distinguished chapter, and Robert Redford directs them with the patience of a man who has nothing left to prove and no interest in hurrying. Jim Grant, a widowed Albany attorney, is unmasked as a former Weather Underground militant, and the machinery of a manhunt grinds into motion alongside Shia LaBeouf's reporter, who chases the story with the desperate energy of a print journalist watching his industry die. The film is a thriller, technically. Mostly it is a long, melancholy conversation about what people did in 1970 and whether they regret it.

There is political residue here, the anti-war radicalism of the Weathermen sitting in the frame like furniture nobody has moved in decades. The film regards its former militants with ambivalence, granting them conviction and cost in equal measure, never quite indicting the system they once bombed against. Julie Christie, Susan Sarandon, and Brit Marling do substantial, complicated work, and the screenplay gives them interior lives instead of talking points. Terrence Howard's FBI agent is simply an FBI agent. The ensemble is a monument to a certain kind of 1970s Hollywood, and its whiteness is the whiteness of a reunion, not a statement.

For a film about radical politics, it is remarkably untroubled by the concerns that dominate the current cultural conversation. There is no environmental sermon, no economic thesis, no gendered critique of power, no examination of identity as a category. What remains is a meditation on the cost of dissent and the slow death of newspapers, delivered quietly by actors old enough to remember when such arguments were simply called politics.