Redford

This past week I meandered up to the video section in the local library. (A shout-out to libraries and librarians!) As I browsed (not unlike a cow chewing daisies), I came across a Robert Redford movie which I had never heard of, All Is Lost, with a cover photo featuring a sailor standing at the helm of a yacht in a driving, drenching storm. Once, long ago and far away, when I was a different person, I owned a small not-a-yacht sailboat myself, so the movie intrigued me.

Before I walked away with my selection, though, another movie caught my eye: The Company You Keep, also starring Redford along with a list of other well-known celebrities. My interest piqued, I took both.

The Company You Keep (2012) is based on Neil Gordon's book by the same name which in turn is loosely based on the mid-1970's paramilitary group, the Weather Underground, which was an American left-wing revolutionary group trying to bring about "the destruction of U.S. imperialism and achieve a classless world: world communism." Though the plot of the movie doesn't follow all the twists of the real-life story, the parallel is obvious. In the fictional piece, years after a bank robbery gone sour, most members of the group have morphed their wild, anti-government protests into respectable, middle-class facades. A widowed lawyer, Jim Grant (Redford), with a young daughter (played by Jackie Evancho who, regrettably, does no singing in this movie) is exposed by a young reporter, and sets out to prove that he had nothing to do with the killing of a bank guard during the robbery for the simple fact that he didn't take part in the robbery. As the reporter and law officials close in, tension rises over whether or not the lawyer will be supported or sold-out by his former lover who still carries the torch of anti-establishment counter-culture warfare through her one-step-ahead-of-the-law drug dealing. The movie's focus on Grant's struggle to clear his name instead of on the moral ambiguity of his group's actions, forces viewers to make up their own minds about the rightness/justice/morality of his group's stance. The cast is full of stars of enhanced name-recognition power such as Shia LaBeouf, Julie Christie, and Susan Sarandon.



All Is Lost (2013), on the other hand, has one character. Well, three counting the boat and the ocean, but one human character. The movie follows a sailor alone on his sailboat who runs afoul of a wayward shipping container bobbing in the middle of the ocean like the thousands of pieces of trash that were washed out to sea by the tsunami in Japan in 2011. The sea-worthiness of his boat is compromised, and the rest of the movie progresses to ever smaller boats/rafts/floatation devices till he has nothing left. The movie begins with a voice-over by Redford/the sailor, and at one point, the sailor is so frustrated that he yells a profanity (though I can't remember exactly which one it is), and that is the total dialogue in the film.

I recommend watching both movies with as little time/clutter as possible between them so their stark differences are more apparent. Take this as an exercise to heighten discrimination, and as a chance to see just how much Redford has grown/matured as an artist since Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.