Today, “liberal” is used as a slur by conservatives, but 40 years ago it was just as likely to be uttered derisively by those who favored more radical methods of change. Such people would have perhaps been sympathetic to the Weathermen, a radical spinoff of the Vietnam antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society. The Weathermen became the Weather Underground, who after a series of bombings in the 1970s mostly disappeared. Some got caught, some went straight, and some stayed underground for a long time. (One who went straight, Bill Ayers, became a controversial figure in the 2008 presidential election.) There’s a very good 2002 documentary (called The Weather Underground) about the group.
Here Robert Redford, also the director, plays an Albany lawyer and, improbably, a single father of a pre-teen girl who’s drawn into the past when an old friend (Susan Sarandon), a Weather Underground member wanted for her role in in a botched bank robbery (resulting in a guard’s death), decides to turn herself in after living under a false identity for decades. For reasons best left unstated here, he winds up on the run trying to hunt down other members. A local journalist (Shia La Beauf) is trying to figure out what’s going on. And both of them wind up traveling around, giving Redford the opportunity to include a variety of locations.
While conservatives may object to the sympathetic portrait of former radicals, it should also be noted that, whereas the actual Weather Underground took care, after a fatal bombing in its early “Weathermen” years, to avoid harming individuals, this film centers around a bank robbery that results in a fatality, an incident that never took place. The script, from a novel by Neil Gordon, is by Lem Dobbs, who has written suspense films like The Limey, The Score, and Haywire rather than morally complex ones. Dobbs and Redford substitute some speechifying by the characters for a more ambiguous exploration of how far it is reasonable to go in service of a cause. The film, never really places you back in the past, when stopping the war seemed like a moral imperative (though the bank robbery is supposed to have taken place later). Instead, the story positions Redford’s character as a liberal exemplar, mounting a defense of liberalism against, not conservatism, but radicalism. La Beauf (an actual investigative newspaper reporter) makes the case for old-fashioned journalistic virtues. This is all subtext and can be easily ignored. As such, Redford has made a good dramatic thriller with an interesting structure and a bunch of famous faces — Chris Cooper, Nick Nolte, Julie Christie, Anna Kendrick, Stanley Tucci, Brendan Gleeson, etc. — in supporting roles.
viewed 5/22/13 7:05 pm at Ritz 5
No comments:
Post a Comment