Dark Goddess Review: "The Company You Keep"

Like most of us who went to Washington to protest the Vietnam War, I was a grain of sand in the huge waves of peace that we thought we were, gliding over the dunes of outmoded tradition and the rocks of aggression and retribution to land each time a little further up the beach, toward a better world. Not too many of us imagined a more military metaphor, as footsoldiers in the march toward freedom, but some did, and all of us knew someone who knew someone who did, and the choice to take up arms for the cause was real, if a little far-fetched.

2012's The Company You Keep is a mature thriller about some who did, enlisted in the cause. Jim Grant is a respected elder lawyer whose Weather Underground past is ferreted out by a young and naive reporter who has not a clue what damage his scoop will wreak. The FBI never forgets, as Susan Sarandon's portrayal of Sharon Solarz so convincingly illustrates. Based on the real-life 1999 arrest and conviction of Kathleen Ann Soliah, for her 1970s participation in a bank robbery and murder with the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), Sarandon's character is not remorseful about the decisions she made so long ago, refusing to forget the context. In a similar vein, Robert Redford's Jim Grant (alias Nick Sloan) has lived a serious life without regrets or fanciful illusions about youthful indiscretions. When he discovers that he is about to be outed, he embarks with his 11 year-old daughter on a complicated plan to keep her safe while he stays one step ahead of the feds (and the reporter) to unearth an unlikely alibi for the crime of which he was accused so many years before. 

The plot is complicated and eccentric, the cast is as star-studded as it gets, and while there is no happily ever after, there is at least resolution. Critics in the US were not as enthusiastic as in Europe, but all agreed that this movie was underplayed and subtle, perhaps romantic about the political idealism, but never sentimental. 

Except in documentaries, I have not in all these years heard anything so truthful about those violent years as The Company You Keep. Common culture has rewritten the Vietnam War so the US was not the loser, allowing once again the rise and adulation of military force and the bootjacked interference with sovereignty, both public and private, that this enables. The concerns of an entire generation have been trivialized as a hippie "fringe" movement that was too self-indulgent to be taken seriously. And the ultimate cynicism of arming and re-arming an increasingly misinformed and diseducated population, filling the tills of the arms makers while disabling any kind of meaningful citizen dissatisfaction with the rape of their country, has been sheer genius. (Damn, I nearly called the NRA lackeys there - difficult to not let it creep up on ya'.)

And so this film made me cry. I recommend it to all who remember.