By Carroll Gelderman (2013)
It’s disappointing that when Shia LaBeouf got into a fight with Alec Baldwin over the play he was fired from, no one took any footage of it. Fortunately, we can see him yell at even more famous actors—Stanley Tucci and the legendary Robert Redford—in Redford’s film “The Company You Keep,” which opens Friday.
LaBeouf plays Ben Shepard, a brash young journalist at a failing small-town newspaper helmed by editor in chief Ray Fuller (Tucci), with whom he often clashes. When Sharon Solarz (Susan Sarandon), a member of the 1960s radical anti-war group the Weather Underground, is arrested in a town nearby after 40 years of undercover cop work, Shepard makes it his mission to chase down and expose her former comrade Jim Grant (Redford) in hopes of making his big break. Grant is forced to leave behind his young daughter to avoid being hunted down by Shepard, who threatens to uncover a truth that will damage many lives.
One of the factors that drew Redford to this piece was his interest in the Weather Underground, which once plotted to plant a bomb in Columbia’s tunnel system.
“When this happened, I was of that age, I was of them in spirit,” he said at a press conference [last year] mediated by Annette Insdorf, the director of undergraduate film studies at Columbia. “I wasn’t a part of it, but I was certainly empathetic to what they were doing because I also thought it was a wrong war,” he added.
Although the Weather Underground was real, “The Company You Keep” is a work of fiction adapted from Neil Gordon’s novel of the same name.
“I was drawn to the book—it was a big, wide-ranging book, and it had a lot of plotlines, and it had many, many characters,” Redford said. “There was something at the core that kept grabbing my attention, so the next four or five years we spent shaping the material into what could be a film.”
Once the script was ready, Redford began to fill the various roles with an all-star cast that also includes Nick Nolte, Chris Cooper, Julie Christie, and Richard Jenkins. Redford said that because of a lack of funds, he had to call in favors from certain actors to appear in his film for no money, including Stanley Tucci, who happily obliged. He said that he felt he owed much of his career to Redford’s creation of the Sundance Film Festival, which supports independent filmmakers.
“Just to be in the room was an honor,” Tucci said. “You want to give back in whatever way you can. Even if it’s just by saying, ‘OK, I’ll be in your movie if that makes you happy.’ Why that would make you happy, I don’t know, but I’m glad.”
Brit Marling, who plays the daughter of an ex-cop portrayed by Brendan Gleeson, also joined the cast as a thank-you to Redford.
“The fact that I am able to make a living as an actor and a writer I owe entirely to this man and to the institution he created,” she said. “Without that, I might be investment banking—who knows what I’d be doing?”
Marling was also quite drawn to the screenplay itself.
“When I read this script, I was really moved by the idea of the Weather Underground and how it’s not set back then but it’s set in present day, as this group has sort of come into age and wisdom and experience,” she said.
She compared the radical group to this generation’s Occupy movement, pointing out the importance of this film in that it shines a light on our current situation.
The Weather Underground “felt the sense of radical accountability for what their country was doing,” Marling said. “I wonder where that sense of radical accountability is in my generation. We don’t feel the same responsibility to be a voice for change and to really stand up for the things we say we believe in … but I still think it is very possible.”
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