Robert Redford's "The Company You Keep'

Robert Redford roots for the underdog. In The Conspirators, it was Mary Surratt, the Washington, D.C., boardinghouse-keeper who was hanged for harboring conspirators in Lincoln's assassination. In The Company You Keep, Redford himself stars as Nick Sloan, a former member of the Weather Underground who's wanted for the killing of a bank guard in a long-ago robbery.

Nick is factually innocent: He'd refused to join the robbery, and the man who'd gone in his place was the actual shooter. The only person who can prove his innocence, though, is his ex-comrade and lover Mimi Lurie (Julie Christie), who has gone deep underground.

Nick prefers to hide in plain sight. He's constructed a new identity for himself as a small-town attorney, and he channels his residual idealism into pro bono work. When his cover is blown by a zealous local reporter, Ben Shepard (Shia LeBoeuf), he becomes his own client, and begins the job of tracking down Mimi while on the lam himself.

The FBI is after him, and so is Ben, who senses a really big story. Naturally, Ben proves the better bloodhound.

Tough luck for Nick

We've seen this movie before, of course: Harrison Ford in The Fugitive, who must evade the law while trying to establish his innocence. In The Fugitive, Ford's Richard Kimble knows he's innocent (in this case of his wife's murder) but doesn't know who the real culprit is. Nick knows exactly who's responsible for the guard's death, and he knows who can clear him.

But why should Mimi want to turn herself in? The Nick and Mimi have a now-grown child between them, Rebecca (Brit Marling), who's been raised by foster parents, but they haven't been in contact for 30 years. It's tough luck for Nick, but he should really have left fewer tracks.

Nick has an alternative choice: He can disappear. The problem is that he's a widower with an 11-year-old daughter, Isabel (Jackie Evancho). He takes off with her, but must hand her off to a younger brother (Chris Cooper) for safekeeping. So Nick doesn't want to lose a second child, or have to implicate her in his own past life.

But what will persuade Mimi to sacrifice herself? Nick hasn't figured this out. Maybe he's relying on the Redford charm.

One exception

The bulk of the film takes Nick from one contact to another among former radicals and fellow travelers. They too have reinvented themselves, and though they're reluctantly willing to help, they're none too glad to attract the attention Nick will bring.

So, where did all those '60s radicals go? Some, like Donal Fitzgerald (Nick Nolte), who owns a lumber company, simply keep a low profile; others, like Jed Lewis (Richard Jenkins), try to keep the flame burning, in this case as a Marxist history professor.

All of them, though, are safely ensconced within the establishment— with the exception of Mimi, who regrets nothing and disavows nothing, and makes her living outside the law as a drug runner (marijuana, not the hard stuff).

When Nick and Mimi meet, scenically enough in an isolated cabin, they get it on romantically for auld lang syne, though the viewer is tactfully spared the sight of elder sex. They disagree politically, however.

Fixed in the past

Nick has decided to do what good he can within the system, defending the indigent and powerless. Mimi feels only contempt for anything that helps the system to work or salve its bad conscience— the work Nick has done. She engages in crime (of a victimless sort) because, in a society irredeemably wicked, only the criminal is pure. It's her way of staying revolutionary.

Nick never pops the awkward question to Mimi— it's clear what her answer will be— but circumstances force her to confront a moral choice she can't evade. Her choice makes sense within the film's dramatic context, but it's stacked by Redford's own liberal sentiments.

Time marches on, life must be lived, but Mimi is fixed in the past. She's heroic on her own terms, and if Redford didn't possess a certain admiration for the romantic outlaw in her (she is shown in glamorous poses and locations, piloting a sailboat and holing up in Big Sur), the film wouldn't work at all.

But no less than Mary Surratt, Mimi is clinging to a lost cause. The war's over. In this case, the bad guys have won— Nick has no reply when Mimi points out that things are worse than ever. But it's still over.

Aging notables

Redford has assembled an all-star cast of aging notables, including four past Academy Award winners and five nominees. Redford himself is proficient at playing his usual disillusioned idealist, a lineal descendant of the stock Bogart character, and Julie Christie, whom I haven't seen in years, is particularly vivid. Susan Sarandon, too, takes a brief but effective turn as the fugitive radical whose arrest sets the story in motion.

The plot is clear enough, but the connecting dots are often obscured in a maze of details and coincidences. The Fugitive handled this challenge better.

Nick's vindication is also too pat: If he can't be convicted of murder, surely the Feds can charge him with something? The FBI doesn't track a man for 30 years just to say, "Sorry, fella."

The Weathermen and John Brown

This film was of some personal interest to me. The late '60s, when the Weather underground was born in frustration and rage at the failure of mass marches and nonviolent civil disobedience to stop the Vietnam War, was a moment when a generation just coming of age discovered in the sins of its fathers not only error and mendacity but evil incarnate. Appeal to the system seemed futile; the system was the evil.

What drove the Weathermen to their violence was what drove John Brown to his: the sense that justice couldn't wait, that wickedness couldn't be tolerated a moment longer.

As they say, you had to be there. I was, and I felt the same impulse. In the end, I decided against self-immolation. But I can still feel the heat of that flame.

Redford was there too. He didn't become an outlaw either; he just played one in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. You'll remember the film. Butch and Sundance flee the law to Bolivia, are tracked down by Pinkerton men, and die in a hail of bullets.

Bonnie and Clyde, another iconic '60s film, ended with the same message: You can't defy the system. Annoy it enough, and it will kill you. Win small victories at the margin if you can (like Redford's Bob Woodward in All the President's Men), but don't take on evil itself. Just define it down to a lesser offense.

Liberal wisdom in a nutshell.