Movies…Robert Redford’s The Company You Keep
For some reason, Robert Redford, The Horse Whisperer, let this movie whisper into theaters a few months ago. Now it is on Video On Demand. No trailers of the movie appeared anywhere. The movie was not promoted on Leno or Late Night With Anyone. The cast is a “who is who” in movies. They deserved better!!! The cast includes Julie Christie, Robert Redford (actor and director), Nick Nolte, Shia LeBeouf, Stanley Tucci, Susan Sarandon, Brit Marling, Terrence Howard, Chris Cooper, Sam Elliott, and Richard Jenkins. Someone should have been on television giving the movie a boost. They were not!!!
This political thriller is based on Neil Gordon’s book, The Company You Keep. The story looks at peaceful, anti-war protesters and those groups that think peaceful demonstration is not the answer. Redford and his friends of thirty years ago are in one or more of these groups. They are all hiding from decisions they have made in their prior lives. Some of these group members are in plain sight while others have completely new identities and the families and life that go with their thirty-year-older faces.
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It is strange how passionate anti-war demonstrators were in the 60’s and 70’s and how different they are now. Maybe, that is the central theme of the movie. Maybe parents trying to protect their children from their past lives is another issue.
With Redford and Christie in a movie, even if it were bad, I would have liked it. The movie was not an Academy Award winner. Yet, Redford uniquely framed faces and let them tell their stories of friendships and beliefs realized and those that were cast by the wayside for other reasons.
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Movie lovers, watching this, will appreciate Redford’s storytelling craft.
Everyone in the theater liked the movie.
Maybe they, too, were Redford and Christie fans.
The critics have not been so kind.
Books…The Horse Whisperer By Nicholas Evans
If you didn’t read this book fifteen years ago, and you like multi-dimensional stories and characters, you should pick this book up for weekend reading at your used bookstore or on your Kindle.
The book and the movie are entirely different. Read the book first and then be shocked with all the changes they made to bring the movie to the screen.
Scarlett Johansson, in one of her first movie roles, plays a young horse lover that is terribly hurt in an accident with her favorite animal. Her mother, Kristin Scott Thomas, hears about the healing powers Redford has with horses. She hopes he can work the same miracles with her daughter. Redford’s ranch is miles away from their home and his idyllic lifestyle might cause trouble with mother and her resistant daughter.
The Horse Whisperer’s rewards for helping horses and their owners as well helping the troubled and their families are quite different in the book and in the movie’s depiction of his powers.
Three Days of The Condor, The Natural, and The Castle are our three favorites of the four-dozen movies Robert Redford has made.
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