The Company You Keep

Robert Redford has assembled a stellar cast of well known actors for his new film The Company You Keep. Once more we have Redford starring in a film about the search for the truth. Only this time, unlike the classic 1976 film All The President’s Men, Redford is not portraying an intrepid reporter. He is instead the person that everyone is looking for.

Rather than having two reporters, like Woodward and Bernstein, we have just one reporter, a Ben Shepard, played by Shia LaBoeuf. Shepard works for the Albany Sun Times instead of the Washington Post, and when we meet him, he is being reamed out by his editor Ray Fuller, played by the always great Stanley Tucci, for missing a story of national importance that happened nearby.

Sharon Solarz (Susan Sarandon) has been apprehended by the FBI. She has been wanted for more than thirty years as a suspect in a bank robbery that went bad, resulting in a by-stander being killed. At the time, Solarz was a part of the Weather Underground, a radical off shoot of the SDS.

Solarz and other members of the bank robbers went off the grid and were never captured. They assumed new identities and basically had hid in plain sight for the last 30 plus years. Since the nearest FBI office was in Albany, Shepard was sent by his editor to get the story and Solarz agreed to an interview.

And that sets the story in motion. Solarz was never in favor of violence, and now that her own children were adults, and her own parents had passed on, she felt it was time to turn herself in. Shepard digs away and discovers that another suspect in the same bank robbery, one Nick Sloan, had taken on the identity of Jim Grant, a practicing attorney in the Albany area.

And that sets Redford’s character in motion.

In setting up the story, that’s about all you need to know.

Darling Companion

One would think, after reading  that the three K’s, Diane Keaton, Kevin Kline, and writer/director/producer Lawrence Kasdan. were involved in the same project, that they would produce something memorable. Unfortunately, Darling Companion, which opens tomorrow (April 20th in New York and Los Angeles) falls a tad short of memorable.

I caught the film yesterday, April 18th, at the Sarasota Film Festival. Darling Companion, despite having an attractive dog on its film posters is really not a film about a dog’s adventures. We meet the dog when Beth (Diane Keaton) and her grown daughter Grace (Elisabeth Moss) rescue an abandoned dog which they had spotted while driving home from the airport. They rush the dog to a vet who tells them the dog is basically ok – aside from a few nicks and bruises – give him a good bath, some solid food, and a lot of TLC and he’ll be fine.

Grace finds this vet called Sam irresistible. We haven’t seen a woman turn on to man this quickly since Julia Louis-Dreyfuss did it repeatedly as Elaine Benes on Seinfeld. Anyway, a year passes, but it’s only a few minutes of film time, and she’s married off, to the vet, never to be seen again except for two brief and unnecessary phone calls she makes while on her honeymoon in Bora Bora.

As for the dog, which they’ve named Freeway, he goes missing while he’s been walked by Beth’s husband Joseph (Kevin Kline) a very successful surgeon specializing in backs and spines. This happens a day or so after the wedding, when they’re up at their vacation home in the mountains.

Beth is very unforgiving. She blames Joseph because a) Freeway was off the leash, b) Joseph was on the phone, and c) Joseph went out without the dog whistle. In fact Beth is so upset by all of this that she has two crying scenes in the first 40 minutes of the film.

With them, at the vacation home, where everyone had gathered for the wedding, are Joseph’s sister Penny played by Dianne Wiest, her boy friend Russell played by Richard Jenkins, and her grown son Bryan (Mark Duplass), who is in fact, a surgeon himself. But that’s only five people – so there’s the gypsy caretaker, housekeeper and cook, Carmen, played by Ayelet Zurer, to round this off to an even number of characters, as well as to give Bryan a ‘love’ interest.