The Company You Keep (2012)

This is a movie that is better after you watch it than while you are watching it.  What I mean is that while the plot and the cast are very solid (the later is in fact blockbuster), the story that it refers to is one that is very complicated, and requires more thought that the 2 hour viewing time allows. 

The story is about three Weather Underground radicals who were theoretically all involved in a bank robbery in Michigan 30 years prior to the setting of the movie and are all still on the run (which means that the movie is set in the early 2000's although if it said that I missed it--but the math doesn't work out otherwise).  Because a man was killed in the bank robbery, they are wanted for murder, which doesn't have a statute of limitation.

One of the three decides to turn herself in.  Sharon Solarz (Susan Sarandon) decides that her children are old enough to be able to manage without her, and she is tired of the guilt.  What she doesn't anticipate is that there is a link between her and Nick Sloan (Robert Redford), which exposes him as well.  He is the father of an 11 year old daughter, and his wife has been killed in a car accident.  He sets out to prove that he was not involved in the bank robbery rather than take his daughter and go underground.  Ben Shepherd (Shia LeBeouf ) is a reporter who first figures out Nick Sloan's identity, and then figures out that he is likely innocent--he is much more successful than the FBI operation at unraveling what happened those 30 years ago.

I watched this film with one of my kids, who found the persecution of these three people morally unsound when the police officers who were beating and on occasion shooting and killing unarmed protesters were not prosecuted.  Two of the three had led upstanding lives in the time since the robbery, and it is hard to imagine what going to jail would do to balance out justice.  A murder is a murder, and there is that to contend with, but the movie brings up the moral ambiguity of the time, especially now that we know that Richard Nixon is on tape saying that he knew the war in Vietnam was unwinnable in the winter of 1971, but that in order to get re-elected he couldn't pull out--and thousands of men in uniform and civilians died so that one man could remain president.