Keep It To Yourself

In the latest New Yorker, David Denby reviews Robert Redford's The Company You Keep.  The movie (which I haven't seen), an earnest work on an earnest subject--60s radicals today--is the kind of middlebrow, classy film that critics often go for, but not this time.  In general, it's been getting thumbs down. 

But Denby smiles.  Why?

In our youth-fixated media culture, the appearance of something as wrinkled as Robert Redford’s “The Company You Keep” is a bit of a surprise. The crow’s-feet—you can’t help noticing them—defiantly flock together in a movie that features, among others, Redford, Susan Sarandon, Julie Christie, Nick Nolte, Brendan Gleeson, Richard Jenkins, and Sam Elliott. Made by someone else, “The Company You Keep” might have provided an occasion for nasty wisecracks, but Redford’s patient earnestness—not always a virtue in his earlier work as a director—produces something honorable and absorbing.

Yep, it's earnest, no question.  Maybe even honorable.  But is it good?  The plot is about a former Weather Underground member (Sarandon) giving herself up to the FBI, which puts a reporter (Shia LeBeouf) on the trail of another member (Redford).

...this film, with its prickly characters and its complicated plot, rips along with tension and power. [...]Redford [...] has a particularly testy relationship with LeBeouf’s reporter, whom the old radical taunts as being an amoral careerist. What about the values embedded in the story he’s reporting? Doesn’t a movement committed to ending a war matter? Sarandon’s Sharon Solarz says pretty much the same thing, and we realize that the two liberal actors are addressing the audience directly. Cocky Ben Shepard is obviously meant to stand in for a generation. Redford and Sarandon want to know why bright young people aren’t angrier about social inequality and two pointless wars. They express the sore chagrin of a movement looking for heirs and finding none.

Let me get this straight.  This movie's about old leftists--the actors, not the characters--accusing the audience of not living up to their ideals?  Where can I get tickets? (And it's actually pretty easy to answer the challenges that Denby lists above, but I guess LeBeouf's character is too busy being an amoral careerist to bother, which is just as well, since I don't think Redford or Denby want to hear any backtalk--this is a lecture, not a discussion.)

Here's the end of the piece:

[The older cast members] are all, as actors, proud of their age and of their persistence, and their fierce stubbornness and pleasure in performing should face down the jeers from the right that the movie will inevitably provoke.

I'm not sure how a performance, even one that's pleasurable for the actor, could face down a political complaint, but then, I don't care about political complaints against movies.  The question is does it entertain. If it fails to do that, nothing else matters.  That Denby feels it necessary to emphasize the specter of right-wing resistance suggests a preemptive strike in defense of what smells like an unpleasant two hours at the cinema.