2012’s “The Company You Keep” was the last film directed by Robert Redford, which tells you something. Redford is an excellent director but often not a commercially popular one: this movie, about aging Sixties radicals and their slow-dawning realization (or not) that their “movement” was ethically and logically flawed did not do well at the box office, and after his previous ethics movie (“The Conspirator,” which I posted about here) bombed, Redford’s days of getting studios to bet on his work were over.
“The Company You Keep” is not as good as “The Conspirator,” but it is surprisingly relevant in 2025 as we watch the American Left struggling with its hypocrisy, foolish utopianism and increasingly obvious hatred for its own country. Redford plays a former Weatherman (“The Weathermen” was the violent faction of the Students for Democratic Action) who has been in hiding in plain sight since a domestic terrorism action by the group turned fatal. When his long-standing alternate identity as a prominent lawyer is outed by an idealistic young journalist, Redford goes on the run. In the process he encounters former fellow-revolutionaries, some of whom still burn for the cause.
One of them is his former lover (played by Julie Christie, whom Redford pulled out of virtual retirement for the role). Another is the well-cast Susan Sarandon, whose character’s own decades-long alternate life has been revealed. She is under arrest for murder, but tells the young reporter that if she had her life to live over again, she would still fight against “the system.” Sarandon appears to be playing herself. Redford’s cast reflects his status among his peers: Redford himself, whose ruined beauty is like a metaphor for the demystified Love Era; Shia Labeouf (before he went nuts),Christie, Sarandon, Chris Cooper, Nick Nolte, Anna Kendrick, Sam Elliott, Stanley Tucci, Brendan Gleeson, Terrance Howard and Richard Jenkins among others.
Redford’s message as a director and in his role is that what the radical Left calls “the system” is what clear-eyed adults realize is “reality.” I was struck by how little the rhetoric of the aging Weathermen varies from what we hear from Democrats and “the resistance” today. Redford’s old friends rail against billionaires and evil corporations exploiting minorities, women and the poor, while believing that “the ends justify the means” and violence is an acceptable means when you are on “the right side of history.” “The system” they favor is, in truth, communism, socialism or anarchy, though the Weatherman’s zenith came before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
What is particularly striking is how today’s descendants of those radicals who found John Lennon’s “Imagine” profound are now demanding that the U.S. continue its very Vietnamish support of Ukraine. The difference is, naturally, that it is U.S. money and weapons, not soldiers, that are supporting the killing there. This reinforces my belief at the time that despite all of their idealistic blather, what the student radicals mainly objected to about Vietnam was the draft.
“The Company You Keep” seen in the context of current events is one more demonstration of Eric Hoffer’s observation that every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket. In the case of Sixties idealism, however, it was never a great cause to begin with.
Ethics Alarms 
This reinforces my belief at the time that despite all of their idealistic blather, what the student radicals mainly objected to about Vietnam was the draft.
That was pretty fucking obvious.
The protests would not have been that massive if there had not been a draft.
Was a draft ethically justified under these circumstances?
After course, after the Paris treaty, the U.S. withdrew troops and only asuppoied weapons and materiel to South Vietnam.
Then Congress cut that off.
And yet…they would indignantly deny that self interest had any influence on their passionate objection to the war.
A sex discriminatory draft was and is immoral.
That literally never occurred to anybody in the Sixties.
What did you do in the war, Daddy?
Three twenty-seven, the displacement in cubic inches
of a Chevy Corvette V-8, right there in the afternoon paper,
right next to my birthday.
I’d never be drafted. Never swelter in a jungle infested with
insects and land mines. Never fly in a helicopter being shot at.
Never wear soaking, Army green, canvas boots. Not have to exile
myself to Canada. Not have to convince myself I was morally
opposed to war, or a Quaker, like, of all people, Richard Nixon.
To celebrate, we drank gin and tonics on our college’s deserted
summer campus while the tall, leafy trees grew darker and the sky
grew translucent. We listened to a Detroit Tigers baseball game
in which Denny McLain, then and still, the last thirty game winner
in years, pitched his first game back from an injury, or a suspension,
or something. In any event, it was a momentous occasion
for my friend, a Detroit area native and Tigers fan.
We drank and got bombed. Likewise, Denny McLain got
shelled and was gone after two and a third innings. And
the color drained from the sky until we could no longer have
seen the canopy of trees even if we’d been able to or cared to.
You poetically captured a moment in time with that post. My number was 333. What a relief it was.
Not our generation’s, nor my, greatest moment. I wouldn’t have passed the physical and couldn’t have run anywhere, never mind over a basic training obstacle course, as my knee had been trashed in high school basketball, but still.
For reasons that totally defy logic, looking back on them, I did not get a student deferment when I entered college. But my number was something like 175 or so, and my draft board was only going to about 125.
My roommate’s number was something like 25. He went and enlisted in, I think, the Coast Guard.
I then proceeded to waste a decent percentage of my college career. I ended up getting my bachelor’s 17 years later.
I’m trying not to over-analyze a surprisingly entertaining thriller drama which I hadn’t thought about since I first saw it. Thanks for the reminder!
(Screaming into the abyss)
Unfortunately, I do not have the time this morning, nor will I have until later tonight. But you know that I, as a former 60s radical and a current radical, have to address this. Hopefully I will have time to watch the movie before I comment. But know this — the “reality” you cite as the epiphany of these aging radicals in the movie is NOT a good thing. It’s the realization that we are in a dysfunctional, psychopathic hell hole and we are doomed to it like misguided Joan of Arc followers. See you after church!
I look forward to it! Be reminded that the official position of Ethics Alarms is that utopianism is unethical: it waste’s time (and money), it is intellectually dishonest, is demonstrably futile, and distracts good and kind people from real solutions rather than “Imagine”-ary ones.