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.

Arbitrage

Let’s see – it’s been 30 years since Richard Gere as as young Zach Mayo got the daylights kicked out of him by his D.I. Sgt. Foley (Louis Gossett Jr.) near the beginning of the film, An Officer and a Gentlemen.

And it’s been 30 years since he carried off his dream woman, a factory worker named Paula, played by Debra Winger to end the same film.

At that moment, Gere’s Mayo may not have been anything more than a man in love. But as an actor he’d grow into more mature and adult roles. By 1990, Gere was partnered with Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.

In this film he was already a Master of the Universe – meaning he was a man who could have anything, or anyone he wanted. Until he ran into Roberts as Vivian Ward, a woman who’d play for pay. Only this time it wasn’t just about money.

Except at the box office where this film took in a very healthy 460 Million plus.

Fast forward to 2012, and we now have Richard Gere as Robert Miller in the new film, Arbitrage. In this one, Miller controls a hedge fund worth a ton (billions) but with an inexplicable $400 million hole in one of its i-beams. Miller lives in a Gramercy Park mansion in New York.

His trophy wife  Ellen is played by Susan Sarandon, and he has two adult children and grandchildren.

His  beautiful daughter Brooke, with her own MBA, is played by Brit Marling. Brooke is the CFO of Miller’s firm. In Miller’s own words, after all – he had it all  - I am a patriarch.

Brit Marling as Brooke Miller

Robot and Frank / Opening Night at the Sarasota Film Festival

First time feature director Jake Schreier’s Robot & Frank opened the Sarasota Film Festival tonight. Lacking only klieg lights, red carpets running from the curb straight into the theater, or a flotilla of limousines, the packed house at the elegant Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall, thoroughly enjoyed the film which, prior to tonight, had garnered awards at the most recent Sundance Film Festival.

The film has successfully woven together three separate or disparate plot lines. On one side we have the tale of a friendship that grows after a rocky start. On the other hand we have a jewel heist. And smack dab in the middle there’s story of an elderly man, living alone in a house in upstate New York, and his memory is failing. Simply, it is a kind of dementia that is steadily encroaching and edging its way into this man’s life. Only he’s not recognizing that it is happening to him.

The film is set in the near future without specifying how far into the future that might be. Some of the cell phones and other forms of communication equipment that we see look a little advanced. But people wear recognizable clothing, and live in familiar looking homes.

Frank Langella stars as the titular Frank. He is about 72 years old. His two children are adults, and his wife has long since vanished into the wind. You see, Frank was a ‘second-story man‘. What you might call a jewel thief. He’s done two stretches in prison – once for a robbery, and the other on what Frank called – a lightweight charge of tax fraud.

He looks like he’s okay. I mean he walks and talks, he shops and sometimes shop-lifts, and he has an interest in the local librarian (Jennifer) played in a wonderfully subdued manner by Susan Sarandon. His diet is nothing special. For example, he enjoys the kid friendly but definitely not nutritious choco-pops cereal in the morning. But he forgets things like taking out the trash, or having fresh milk instead of spoiled milk for his cereal. He thinks he’s had dinner recently at a local restaurant called Harry’s – only it has been closed for years.

When his grown son Hunter comes to visit him weekly (a lengthy 10 hour round trip) Frank asks him how he’s doing at Princeton. “Dad – I went to Princeton long ago. It’s been 15 years since I got out of school.”