The Company You Keep (2013)

The company you keep, you put yourself above.  I'm on to you!  I still have a soft spot for Hurricane...

Not that the hair-band Hurricane has anything to do with The Company You Keep, the latest Robert Redford directed film, based off a Lem Dobbs screenplay, which was based off the (presumably boring) book of the same name by Neil Gordon.

I might have just played my hand with the previous paragraph, but that pretty much sums up my thoughts on the film.  It's boring.  The Company You Keep is one of those films where they've assembled a great cast of pros (it's well acted at least), then setup a what appears to be a nice thriller/mystery, only to have it play out extremely slowly, with each reveal having no real impact.  This, again, is compounded by the fact this poorly paced film is over two hours.  BROKEN RECORD!  Hey, who said that?  At first glance, when you see the people involved in making the film, and the great cast, you think it might be an early Oscar contender.  Unfortunately, that isn't what we got here.

The Company You Keep begins with Sharon Solarz (Susan Sarandon) being arrested.  We learn that she was a former member of a radical group wanted for a bank robbery and murder of a bank guard nearly 30 years ago.  Local reporter Ben Shepard (Shia LaBeouf) investigates and finds that Sharon was about to turn herself in anyway, and through friends tried to get a local lawyer, Jim Grant (Redford), to take the case.  Grant wasn't interested in the case even though it seemed like something in his wheelhouse.  Shepard presses on, only to find that Grant was also involved in the radical group, and was a suspect in the same bank robbery.  Don't worry, this isn't a spoiler to tell you this.

Grant goes on the run, contacting estranged friends and family in the effort to find Mimi (Julie Christie), a former partner of Grant's.  We aren't sure exactly why Grant is so desperate to find her, but upon seeing that Grant is wanted by the police, she goes out on her own to find him.

This is where The Company You Keep let me down.  You've got all these threads going on with Grant and Mimi, then The Beef (that's what I call LaBeouf) investigating, and the FBI (led by Terrence Howard) hot on their trail, but there's never any urgency to it.  Plot threads and characters are just dropped without any resolution or given much development.  It felt like a TV series that was meant to stretched into a season long arc, but was streamlined to only be two or three episodes.  You might think that means it has a frenetic pace with all the things going on, yet we got the opposite.  It's so slow that I actually had to fight off falling asleep for much of the the last third of the film.  Plus, the conclusion is so anti-climactic that you're left wondering why you bothered sitting through it all.

I'm not sure if this was an issue of the book not translating well, or maybe having to condense too much of it to fit into a movie.  There isn't even an entry for the book or author on Wikipedia, so my research is limited.  From what I can see on Amazon, the book's synopsis seems to have a much different setup than how the movie was, so perhaps too much was changed for the sake of adapting it.  It's shame because I really like Lem Dobbs as a writer, but it looks like he really misses working with Steven Soderbergh (they've done at least three films together).  I don't even think Robert Redford did that bad of a job directing, as he did a good job with the actors, and managed to make it interesting enough in the first half.

It is really well acted though.  Redford is great, as well as Julie Christie.  As hard as I am on The Beef, I actually thought he had the right blend of arrogance, mixed with an honest drive to uncover the truth.  The supporting cast is fleshed out with actors like Stephen Root, Nick Nolte, Brit Marling, Stanley Tucci, Chris Cooper, Anna Kendrick, Richard Jenkins, Sam Elliott and Brendan Gleeson.  When you have such notable actors in smaller roles, you tend to think their characters may be more significant to the actual story, and are disappointed when they aren't in it more or aren't fleshed out enough.  It's just a shame to not see these people get something meatier to work with.  It makes me wonder if Redford just called in a bunch of favors to fill out his cast, or the actors just really wanted to work with him.  Can't say I blame any of them though.

The Company You Keep is yet another well-acted film with a star studded cast, but unfortunately the story comes up way short with its slow pacing and disappointing resolution.  It's not a bad movie, but it is pretty forgettable.  I actually saw this over a week ago and forgot that I never got around to posting my review.  This is not something you need to rush out and see, and has rental written all over it.

2.5 (out of 5) Death Stars

Arbitrage (2012) - Movie Review

I was interested in getting some insight into what Arbitrage was and how it related to the film, so I looked it up and found that, 'arbitrage' loosely translates to 'rich, white people problems.'  Okay, I made that up.  In all seriousness, I couldn't figure out how actual arbitrage had anything to with Arbitrage.

Richard Gere plays Robert Miller, a hedge fund manager who's in the process of selling his company.  He's also trying to cover up a $400 million dollar loan being used to cook his books and cover for a loss until the sale goes through.  I was never really quite clear on what the deal was with this $400 million, and even when it was explained later, I still wasn't.  Like last year's Margin Call, you never quite understand the financials or what they're are talking about, but at least Margin Call feels like a smart movie that knew what it was talking about.  Arbitrage felt like it was faking it's way through it.

Miller has a lovely and supporting wife (Susan Sarandon), so naturally he's cheating on her with an emotionally-unstable artist that's half his age (Laetitia Casta).  The movie sets up Miller as an unlikable asshole and never does anything to make you root for him as the movie goes on.

One night he goes for a drive with his mistress, and gets into a car wreck that kills her.  He flees the scene, which was stupid because he's pretty much the only guy anyone would suspect, and contacts an old acquaintance, Jimmy Grant (Nate Parker), to use as an alibi.  It takes only hours before the lead police detective (Tim Roth) is questioning his role in the accident.  Miller knows that if this gets out, it will kill the sale of his company, not to mention expose the $400 million he's hiding, so he's trying to deal with both cover-ups simultaneously.  It's here where the movie kind of lost me.  What was this movie trying to be?  A financial thriller or a crime thriller?  In trying to be both simultaneously  it felt a little all over the place, and it really hurt the film.  Each story could have been told separately.  In fact, this felt like something that should have been on a TV series, like a season of Damages.

As the cops get closer to nailing him, he continues to lean heavily on Jimmy to keep up the alibi. You continue to get irritated with Miller, because you realize that he picks this one guy in his world he knows won't rat on him.  Even when faced with a prison term, Jimmy won't rat him out. He continues to string Jimmy along, begging him to be patient until he can take care of his business. At one point, even Jimmy's girlfriend tells him to give him up, and by then I wish he had, too. Miller didn't deserve that kind of loyalty, and it was clear Jimmy was being taken advantage of.

I credit the performance of Richard Gere for being able to make Robert Miller compelling to watch even though there is no reason at all to like him.  He's doing shady business dealings, lying to everyone, cheating on his wife, and taking advantage of someone to keep his ass out of trouble. Model citizen, huh?  Anyway, Gere carries the movie and it's one of his better roles in recent memory.

Maybe this was the point, but the worst part of this, is despite all of this - SPOILER ALERT - there's no consequence to any of his actions, other than his wife leaving him.  You're actually glad she leaves him at the end.  Were they trying to make a statement saying that evil, rich business men get away with cheating and murder?  There's also something the police do at the end that made me scratch my head at how ridiculous it was.  It undermined the movie a little bit because it gave Miller's character an out he didn't deserve.

Besides Gere, Arbitrage features a very strong supporting cast.  I always like Tim Roth, and here he plays streetwise cop that knows Miller is guilty and really wants to see him burn.  He's a little corny at times, but it seems like he had fun with the role.  I'm sure he's hoping he'll get a chance to play a variation of his character from Lie to Me, and I'd like to see that.  Susan Sarandon has a great scene at the end, but she's barely in it.  Then again, she's been in so much stuff lately that maybe she only had a day or two to shoot her scenes.  Their daughter is played by Brit Marling, and while I really enjoyed her in Another Earth, I felt she was very flat here.  The guy the really surprised me was Nate Parker.  He ends up being the only really sympathetic character in the film and showed some nice internal conflict and range.

Arbitrage was written and directed by Nicholas Jarecki, and it's once again another movie that suffers from not quite knowing what it's identity is.  It actually felt like something that could have been a adaptation of a novel, but then they couldn't figure out what to get rid of to make it all fit in a movie, so they just left everything in.  He did a good job with the performances and I did feel like there was some tension, but there were a few too many plot holes for me to get much out of the story.

Arbitrage is a movie that feels like it's being trotted out as Oscar bait, and while there is a pretty compelling performance by Richard Gere, the movie itself is too uneven to say it elevates to those heights.  It's not a bad movie, but it's not as good as it thinks it is, and ends up being kind of forgettable.  It's a rental.

2.5 (out of 5) Death Stars