THRILLER; 2hr 5min
STARRING: Robert Redford, Shia LaBeouf, Julie Christie
Storm clouds: Redford
The mills of God are grinding flat-chat in director-star Robert Redford’s astutely cast film of Neil Gordon’s 2003 novel. For 30 years, Jim Grant (Redford), a recently widowed Albany, New York, lawyer with an 11-year-old daughter (Jackie Evancho), has been minding his own, strictly legal business. But when a Vermont wife and mother (Susan Sarandon) is charged by the FBI with a three-decades-old shooting that took place when she and Grant were members of the Weather Underground, a radical, anti-war student action group, the past slams headlong into the present. Outed by a terrier newspaper reporter (LaBeouf), Grant is now also accused of murder. His only choice, as he sees it, is to track down the woman who can set him free (Christie) — assuming the Feds doesn’t nab him first.
Redford is a cool-headed director, piecing together the political argument and deepening intrigue of Lem Dobbs’s intricate screenplay with the proficiency of a practised strategist. Multi-tentacled stories can be slippery beasts but this one stays cleanly on course through a thoughtful exploration of choice and consequence.
