Countries: USA,

Stars: Robert Redford, Brit Marling, Stanley Tucci,

Genres: Thriller,

MPAA Rating: Unknown

Runtime: 125 minutes

Watch The Company You Keep Full Movie

I saw this film at the Ghent filmfestival 2012. It was not part of the official selection nor the official competition section, but rather put in a "miscellaneous" section called Previews. A considerable part of the story line is about the contrast between a resourceful young journalist who finds out interesting things on his own devices, compared with the FBI continuously running behind the facts. Both stories run in parallel, thereby creating some weak form of tension, but not too much while it is obvious that the eager journalist will win the race eventually. We've seen a plot model like this many times before, and variants thereof in the form of an amateur detective versus the police. In other words, not very original, but it works here only to a certain degree. Some of the time I even found it a bit of a stretch, wondering why the young journalist had so much luck in his discoveries. A more interesting topic is how the past comes back to bite our main character. In his younger years when the underground movement where he belonged to, undertook several illegal actions, each participant could depend on the others to keep things secret. The anti-Vietnam movement as of 30 years ago probably will not ring a bell with most modern viewers, failing to appreciate how radical some such actions were at the time. It went much further than the rather peaceful movements we saw recently, like Occupy and the like. In other words: we would call them "terrorists" nowadays. Placing bombs and killing adversaries were tools of the trade, when deemed necessary in view of the greater good.