THE COMPANY YOU KEEP (M)
Stars: Robert Redford, Susan Sarandon, Shia LaBeouf
Director: Robert Redford
WHEN housewife Sharon Solarz (Susan Sarandon) stares mournfully out the kitchen window one morning, we can assume drama is imminent.
But instead of facing down the usual mid-life trials and tribulations, Solarz is arrested at gunpoint by the FBI and exposed as a fugitive terrorist.
Soon, small-town attorney Jim Grant (Robert Redford) is on the run, wanted by the feds for a 30-year-old crime.
What unfolds is an enjoyable, if never particularly gripping, political thriller involving the infamous 1960s radical group the Weather Underground. Undoubtedly, the cast is its best asset.
Redford is always watchable and even Shia LaBeouf, as pushy journo Ben Shepard, is more engaging than he’s been in a long while.
Cameos from well-known (and well-worn) faces help lift a pedestrian plot, but ultimately the film gets bogged in muddy ground between fact and fiction.
In striving to feel like a memoir, it prunes back the action elements but then ties up its tale in some all-too-neat knots.
