An email summarising the FBIs involvement in the film says that in exchange for prop and wardrobe information along with answering some questions and permission to use the FBI seal they provided advice and made substantive script changes regarding: 1) Excessive Force arresting a housewife driving to turn herself in. Don't let people miss on a great quote from the "The Company You Keep" movie - add it here! The actual Weathermen did a lot more damage than their make-believe counterparts in The Company You Keep. The involvement of Ayers and Dohrn in a vast array of bombings is indisputable. Though the Weather Underground was already falling apart and fading, this is regarded by some as the moment it all came to an end. His ex-vet-gone-rogue pantomime is the most sardonically humorous moment in, The WUO, asserts Evan Williams, became a nationwide protest movement. The Ben Shepard character is only allowed to feel legitimately proud of himself when he realises that there is a higher truth than the literal truth or, as Marxists are wont to say, the bourgeois truth. This, of course, has no connection to reality, and yet it was as good a pretext as any for Americas homegrown bomb throwers. Sharon Solarz drives from Vermont into New York state, where she is promptly arrested by FBI agents at a gas station and charged for the guard's murder at the bank over 30 years earlier. It is something of a throwback, it is shot in a quaint 1970s style and that, along with its subject matter, is probably why it did better internationally than it did in the US. The name of the new inmate is Sharon Solarz (Susan Sarandon), and it seems as if she was trying to turn herself in, though no one is quite sure why, especially given her history of successful evasion. Hence the popularity of everything from Breaking Bad to Bonnie and Clyde. For example, US military manuals on guerilla and terrorist gangs says that successful operations provide a psychological boost to the gang members, making them believe their cause is going to succeed. Still, Redfords goal is obviously something else altogether. . Not that key players such as Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, both members of the WUO leadership team, the Bureau, did much time in jail when they eventually turned themselves in. The result of this is that what started out as a relatively even-handed script that criticised both the Weathermen and the FBI became a film that only criticised the Weathermen. The Weather Underground was a far-left militant organization first active in 1969, founded on the Ann Arbor campus of the University of Michigan.Originally known as the Weathermen, the group was organized as a faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) national leadership. The Weather Underground were the most active and successful militant left-wing group in US history. As a brief aside Billy is played by Stephen Root, one of my favourite supporting actors in everything from Office Space to Fargo. Her FBI interrogators skulk behind a two-way mirror while Solarz lectures the young and supposedly cynical journalist Ben Shepard (Shia LaBeouf) about the reason for her militancy all those years ago: Kids our own age were being murdered by our own government.. It tells a somewhat fictionalised story, obviously inspired by real people and events. It was Ayers who manoeuvred the Detroit terrorist unit into planning an attack on the citys Police Officers Association building: We blast the [expletive deleted] building to hell. With us, they root for us publicly, and secretly, deeply, profoundly, they hope we will fail. Shes not talking about flag-waving right-wingers; she means her colleagues on the left, ex-Movement people who have settled into middle-class lives -- and readers of this novel. "'First trailer for Redford's 'comeback' movie, "Venice line-up unveiled with 50 world premieres", "Toronto 2012: Festival Director Piers Handling Expects Strong Film Market", "Voltage juices up international strategy", "TIFF '12: Robert Redford Is On the Run In, "Sky Broadband customers targeted for allegedly pirating Robert Redford film", "Great-grandmother accused of Robert Redford film piracy", Redford and cast interviewed about making the film (2013), "Arts Beat: Live Streaming: TimesTalks with Robert Redford and Shia LaBeouf, May 2012 interview with Robert Redford about the film, Bill Ayers 2008 presidential election controversy, Bombings of the Office of California Prisons, Bombing of the New York Department of Corrections, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Company_You_Keep_(film)&oldid=1125353147, Pages containing links to subscription-only content, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, Giovani Giurati del Vittorio Veneto Film Festival Award, This page was last edited on 3 December 2022, at 15:32. Williams furthermore asserts that their bombings were preceded by evacuation warnings to minimise casualties. Toms writing and research has appeared in The Mirror, RT, Salon, Newsweek, The Atlantic, The Independent, Insurge Intelligence, Shadowproof, TechDirt and elsewhere. Violence can also be effective I have no doubt the riots and the bombings helped motivate the Nixon government to find an end to the Vietnam War. If you watch the whole Arthur Eckstein presentation then youll probably figure it out. Youre a pig, Grathwohl, accused Donghi. Jim leaves the cabin so that the FBI will chase him instead of Mimi. Billy is growing and maybe dealing marijuana, but the FBI insisted that theyd have to know he was using the phone for that purpose in order to convince a judge to give them the wiretap. As it dramatises many of these personal dilemmas, the film also combines journalist investigation with political thriller. Nick Sloan (alias Jim Grant) might be a former Weatherman but, as far as the audience can discern, he has done nothing wrong. This was all problematic for the Bureau, so they changed the script and we ended up with this: Note how the FBI agent accidentally reveals that somewhere in the case there are wiretaps, but theres no suggestion of why theyre tapping Billys phone or what they heard or that they knew Sharon was going to turn herself in, or that the wiretap might have been illegal. For Solarz, there is an antinomy between the personal and the political. Real celebrities of the time - such as Bruce Lee, Sharon Tate, and Steve McQueen - and real-life tragedies like the Manson family murders lend a sense of reality to the thematically chaptered. But nothing is simple in this novel, and theres enough trouble and sorrow to go around without wishing for more. Unknown at that time, the CIA were also knee-deep in all this. Moreover, the radicals who believed America was toxic still believe America is toxic and in need of a radical overhaul. In my opinion its a pretty good film, a solid thriller with plenty of well-written dialogue and strong performances from its ensemble cast. They do not produce effective results. She was the second of four children. Too many people witnessed Dohrns nauseating invective for Bill Ayers, fellow Bureau member, to be able to deny it, and so later he claimed Dohrn was being ironic if somewhat tasteless. She's an asshole with a heart of gold. Robert Hellenga is the author of several novels, including "Blues Lessons," "The Sixteen Pleasures" and "The Fall of a Sparrow. Grathwohl, however, makes it clearin a chapter titled Trying to Stop the Bombingsthat there were no evacuation warnings for the bombs in Detroit, which threatened not only the Police Offers Association building and the Red Barn Restaurant, but also a police station in the Thirteenth Precinct: A search of the station turned up another bomb neatly wrapped in a waterproof bag inside a toilet tank in the womens rest room. In the fantasy world of The Company You Keep, we are meant to sympathise with Sharon Solarz. Sharon was one of the original panelists on The Talk, but she's made a ton of money thanks to other projects over the course of her career. Young, good looking, out-flanking all others from the left (indeed denouncing others as hopelessly entangled with bourgeois life) few could stand against them. Meanwhile, Mimi turns her boat around and returns to the U.S. to give herself up. Your email address will not be published. Sharon Sharz. It included interviews with members of the group, concealed so they could not be identified. A former political activist goes on the run after a journalist discovers his identity. The SDS did not survive the machinations of Ayers, Dohrn and their ilk. Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. Susan Sarandon as Sharon Solarz, a former member of the Weather Underground Jackie Evancho as Isabel Grant, Jim's 11-year-old daughter, who is unaware of her father's past Brendan Gleeson as Henry Osborne, the officer who had first investigated the bank robbery for which Grant is wanted Brit Marling as Rebecca Osborne, Henry's adopted daughter Puerto Madero N9710, Oficina 22, Pudahuel - Santiago | asl sign for olive garden [The film] is streaked with melancholy: a disappointment that the second American Revolution never came. Aside from this rather simplified view of the Weather Underground in its early days it is a very good documentary, it explains the political philosophy of the group and tells a fairly linear story of its progression. If you're not automatically redirected . The Company You Keep essentially endorses their immoral past, implying that their only crime was to care too much. In contemporary society, there is a fundamental contradiction between personal or individualised interest and left-wing politics. What is it to ponder dutifully? Neil Gordons third novel, The Company You Keep, consists of 42 e-mails sent by various members of The Committee, a mysterious group of balding ex-hippies to 17-year-old Isabel, or Izzy, who is at school in England, where she can be protected (and monitored) by the bodyguards of her powerful grandfather, a former senator and currently the U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. Jamess. Still, the films depiction of the group is not unfair. FBI agents, under the direction of Diana's boss Cornelius (Terrence Howard), have been tracking Daniel and follow him to the hotel. [15] Its limited release in the U.S. began in New York and Los Angeles on April 5, 2013, after which it received wider North American release. A private investigator helps Ben find out that Jim had no Social Security number prior to 1979 and finds a copy of Jim Grant's California death certificate. Indeed, another act of violence would signal the end of the organisation. The Company You Keep cannot quite transcend the boundaries of the question posed by the Weather Underground members themselves: were we right or wrong? View Sharon Solarz's business profile as student at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. His prickly editor, Ray Fuller (Stanley Tucci), assigns him to follow up. Entdecke besetzung und Stab von The Company You Keep - Die Akte Grant von Robert Redford mit Shia LaBeouf, Robert Redford, Susan Sarandon Gregory Solarz is a Supervisor, Information Systems Support at Marco based in Saint Cloud, Minnesota. You can even find pictures of him at the scene. [22] Rex Reed wrote in The New York Observer that "From a dazzling display of perfect performances, to the complex emotional relationships that result in guilt by association, the disparate elements in The Company You Keep are robustly collated by the keen, well-crafted direction of a master filmmaker at the top of his form. Made us crazy. Here Hoffmans rhetoric echoes that of Solarzs in her interview with Shepard. Historically, there were many theoretical justifications for the rhetoric: to force people at home to make a choice, to use confrontational tactics as symbolic actions, to contribute materially to the struggles of the oppressed overseas. Remarkably, the less radical of the two groups saw itself as Maoist; the other crowd, which constituted the nucleus of the WUO, sought to instigate a violent revolutionary war in the USA. They have employee benefit programs and give a lot of their profits to charity. As Evan Williams says, Shepards old-fashioned news-gathering techniques, which include cultivating contacts, searching out leads and combing through library archives, lead the audience to wonder how ethical is young Bens fact-finding procedure, and if he cares who gets hurt in the process. Quick Facts Current address for Shannon is 4918 7th Strt, Lubbock, TX 79416-4923. They never killed anyone else (though a later splinter-group from them did), and it is here that The Company You Keep breaks from history. As Im sure youve noticed, this film has an A-list cast, helped no doubt by the fact Redford is a very nice guy who comes across as genuine in what he does. In this period, SDS grew from hundreds to close to 100,000 members. His prickly editor, Ray Fuller (Stanley Tucci), assigns him to follow up. In both cases were left wondering what might have been. Mobile Number (***) ***-**** Engage via Mobile. Despite being found guilty of illegal surveillance and large-scale breaching of citizens constitutional rights he was let off with a fine of $3500. And yet, The Company You Keep reopens the debate about them, and meditates on the trajectory of the 1960s left, from activism to family life, for the most part. They are portrayed as idealists, most of whom are self-critical yet still hold, in uncertain ways, to their principles. I wont give it away, but he is clearly based on a real person. Career opportunities, material rewards, social status all these are open to the political right or the apolitical. E: ron.solarz@nmrk.com P: 212-372-2306. Redirecting you to the search page. Meanwhile, Jim and Isabel arrive in New York City. Sign up to get Spy Culture posts direct to your inbox. Grathwohls Bringing Down America shows the Bureaus objective was to hijack the student discontent generated by the draft and the Vietnam War in order to advance a radical leftist agenda.
