It’s long been a puzzle to me why the sizzling years in the United States from say, 1963 to 1975, haven’t figured much in widely read fiction or good movies. WW II, 70 years later, is still the backdrop for good thrillers, TV shows [The Spies of Warsaw, Alan Furst on both counts] and movies. The American war in Vietnam produced a handful of war movies, a few coming-home movies, but has not remained as a touchstone for tales of bravery, cowardice, moral ambiguity or, heck, light comedies with song and dance. As to the improbable events of the Civil Rights, the dogs, the beatings, the jailings, the incredible courage, or the anti-war movement and its draft resisters going to prison, active duty military turning in wings, medals, careers, or those who gave up years to organize migrant farm labor, or the women’s movement, gay rights — next to nothing. Documentaries, yes. Good and bad people, lawyers, long meetings, rallies that failed, rallies that drew tens of thousands, thugs, dark alleys, taboo breaking love affairs? Nada. Seems like there is lots of material ripe for exploiting.

So it was with some hope I went to see Robert Redford’s The Company You Keep. Redford is a serious film maker with some small gems in his hat band. The movie got decent reviews. A story about a man committed to stopping US slaughter in Vietnam 40 years earlier who was wanted for a bank robbery and shooting death of a guard coming out of hiding, wrapped in fading memories, finding old friends, conflict between them, changes in perspective, parenthood, eternal moral questions stretched and spun between then and now would seem to hold promise.

A promise that didn’t pan out for me.

Based on a novel by Neil Gordon, but completely reconfigured [the novel worked its way by means of 42 e-mails between father (Redford), reporter (LaBoef), old friends of the father and his 17 year old daughter (not in book) trying to explain why she had been abandoned 10 years earlier and to persuade her to come testify at a bail hearing.] Redford and his screen writer, Lem Dobbs, shape-shifted it into a)a reporter chasing the story b) the FBI chasing the bad guy and c) the bad guy chasing a witness/old lover to get her to say to the FBI he isn’t a bad guy at all.

Somehow, despite some nice moments, it didn’t come together for me, nor did it give the attention to moral argument which, I take it, the novel did. Redford got seduced, in my opinion, by the same thing that seduces so many ‘thriller’ directors: high technology, gleaming machines, magical computers in the service of the oldest tension builder of all — will the pursuers catch the pursued?

I could have done with a dogged reporter, not quite as smarmy as Shia LaBoef, given more time to show how he did his work — and not just talking out loud with wild, but dead-on, guesses about what might be happening in the bad guy’s brain. The cop chase could have been considerably reduced, with less high-tech black magic. [Does the FBI really spend multi-millions of dollars to track down a fugitive whose last known bad deed was 40 years ago with the urgency of following a hot lead on an upcoming car bombing?]

I have to say also, mea culpa, that seeing Redford [as Jim Grant/Nick Sloan depending on the year] at 76 years old in tight focus talking to his 9 year old daughter, makes it harder to suspend my disbelief. ‘Not likely!’ says my actual self. Nick Nolte is gravelly and gruff, to the point of incomprehension, but seems properly cast. Julie Christie as Mimi, a drug running single-hand sailor, in the same age cohort as Redford (and me for that matter) seems, as Redford, to be twenty years at least too old for what she is doing: both go running through the woods, for instance, at pretty good clips, for a good long while, carrying more than modest backpacks. My knees, and those of almost everyone I know in their 70s –as they are, and look to be– would betray me after about ten such paces.

The most disappointing however, is that though some reviewers are hearing significant dialog between the characters as to what they did then and how they feel now, for me it was present mostly in its absence. Was a bank robbery which involved the death of a guard at all an adequate response to the horrors they felt about the war — and which Mimi in one of the few powerful moments articulates? Do they have any sense of how their actions affected tens of thousands around them, who shared their views but not their fight-fire-with-fire mindset? How do they see their former selves, now with the hindsight of 40 years? For that matter, who was each to the other then, and why are they angry, reluctant to help, now? The novel posits that these people, called ‘the committee,’ are trying to help one of their old cohort by joining in an e-mail history and persuasion string to the young woman. In the movie we get that Redford is seen as a threat to each, but not why. We don’t know who they were to each other then so can’t make much sense out of the ten minutes of antagonism we see on the screen now.

There are some standard Redford tropes — beautiful vistas, glistening nature, dew, leaves, streams. He has a dance card full of first rate actors which adds to the hope the movie will be strong. Redford’s own character is sincere as he himself is. Even when Nick Sloan’s plea to Mimi to set things right seems to fail he acts as a decent man, trying to decoy the FBI so she can get away. It’s not a bad film, just not a great one. Because the packaging is the chase, the gift inside — the historical-moral argument, robust or caviling, anguished or proud, regretful or no regrets, militant or penitent– is meager and only sketched in on the run.

Since the packaging is the physical chase, the mental chase – of ideas, passions, love and revolution, age and experience– is wisped away. A Wallace Shawn ‘talkie’ [My Dinner with Andre] with the old radicals re-hashing their lives and dealing with the false accusation against one, over several dinners and breakfasts, could have let us in on the excitement and urgency people felt than, and how time and experience had reshaped them.

I suspect the book does a much better job of setting out the history of the times and the arguments that ripped through the air, at least from what I can read of reviewers who had not then been born (goodreads.) Here’s an interview with the book author Neil Gordon. Decide for yourself.

For me, the stories, and novels and movies about the ’60s’ are yet to come. How about a murder on a picket line where some are fighting for justice and some are fighting to keep what they’ve got? How did the dead woman get to the picket line and who wanted to keep her away? Or the one about two brothers, one who goes to fight the Viet Cong and one who goes to jail rather put on a uniform? Or the attempted kidnapping of the National Security adviser who has set in motion a war and lied to congress about its existence? There are a million stories waiting to be told.

I’d better get to work….

How about you?