The Company You Keep, the all-star drama from director Robert Redford, expands its theatrical run this weekend to include several new cities including Denver. Early reviews say the movie paints its main characters, former Weather Underground-style radicals forced to own up to their violent deeds, in a flattering light.
The film’s producers couldn’t anticipate the theatrical expansion would come just days after a pair of domestic bombings in Boston left three dead and scores grievously wounded.
Several film critics, who filed their reviews prior to the April 15 terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon, raved over the film’s depiction of aging radicals still fighting the “good” fight.
Rex Reed gushes that Company “offers some earnest insight into the validity of the noble but misdirected romantic idealism of the ’70s radicals.”
The Hollywood Reporter says the film “provides an absorbing reflection on the courage and cost of dissent.”
Time magazine says, “The Company You Keep is streaked with melancholy: a disappointment that the second American Revolution never came, and a sadness at giving up the fulfilling, above-ground lives that Nick and the others might have pursued.”
Movie goers may not be so forgiving, what with the fresh images of bloodshed in Boston still on their minds. And, if they do a little research on the real Weather Underground, they’ll learn of its bomb-making exploits, its murderous bank robbery (conducted long after The Vietnam War wrapped) and the unrepentent nature of key Underground figures like Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.
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