American movies like The Weight used to be a dime a dozen, which is meant as a compliment. It used to be that Hollywood loved to take an action-heavy script, people it with a fun combination of big stars and delightful character actors, move like the wind from one entertaining set-piece to another and send everyone home after a tight runtime with a smile on their face. This is now so rare that movies like The Weight must tour the festival circuit (a world premiere at Sundance, an international premier at the Berlinale) in order to get the attention that normally would have come just from being a good night out. But American movies are rarely interested in calm competence anymore. This is a damn shame, but everything within The Weight is perfectly calibrated for a great time.
It’s 1930s Oregon and down-at-heel widower Samuel Murphy (Ethan Hawke playing expertly to type) finds himself imprisoned after getting beaten up by some cops. The real trouble is that his lovely little daughter Penny (Avy Berry) is therefore up for adoption. To cut his sentence down in order to try and stop this, Murphy joins a road-building crew up in the mountains overseen by the menacing Clancy (Russell Crowe having a wonderful time). He’s put to work breaking rocks and blowing up hillsides with career criminal Rankin (Austin Amelio, one of the great new character actors of American cinema), decent farmer Olson (Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen), and Singh (Avi Nash), an intellectual/socialist surprised as anybody that Oregon race laws consider him white. After Murphy demonstrates some unusual intelligence, the supervisor (Alec Newman) makes him an offer. The gold standard is shortly being ended by the government meaning the gold bars held in a different forest camp have to be traded in. If Murphy and his friends walk the 80 pounds of gold through the mountainous forest into Clancy’s waiting hands, their sentences will be cleared, and Murphy will be able to retrieve his daughter. So what this errand is clearly not legit. So what they’ll be under armed guard the whole time by the unpleasant Amis (Sam Hazeldine) and the even worse Letender (George Burgess). And so what if a woman named Anna (Julia Jones) notices their theft from the camp and invites herself to join them on the reasoning anywhere is better than there? Penny is waiting, and Murphy will move heaven and earth to get back to her, if that’s what it takes.
In his first film, director Padraic McKinley never quite manages to move the script (by Matthew Chapman, Matthew Booi and Shelby Gaines) past ‘one damn thing after another’ pacing, but this is not really a complaint. The variety of threats are clever, physically tough, and frightening, Matteo Cocco’s cinematography emphasises the physical struggle the characters are enduring, and the music (by Mr. Gaines, who has worked with Mr. Hawke before) ensures the pacing never drops. The standout in the supporting players is Mr. Amelio, whose unpredictable, compulsively irritating energy acts as sand in everybody’s shoes, an unusual but distinct achievement (it would be fascinating to see that in a romcom sometime). The smallness of Mr. Crowe’s part is a surprise, but he clearly found the project interesting and has the career gravitas to no longer need leading-man status. If he’s turning into someone like Gene Hackman we are here for it.
But this is Mr. Hawke’s show the whole way through. I’ve written before about how he is the best we currently have at portraying a man in crisis, and The Weight never stops finding startling new ways to trouble him. (The bit with the wedding ring is all the more disgusting for being so low-key.) The cruelty and the dangers of the forest setting keeps everything on edge, as does the nature of the relationships between the crew. Murphy trusts himself, and Olson is granite the whole way down, but everyone else is a wild card. Kindness might pay off, or it might be the last mistake you ever make. Fighting might be the right choice, or it might open the door to another fresh hell. But no one ever makes the mistake of telling Murphy to give up on his little girl. He would go through all this and worse a thousand times for her, and the others can only wish someone loved them that much. The only question is just how much suffering any one person can endure before hope dies with them. As for us, let’s hope The Weight restarts this kind of once-everyday entertainment. A good time at the movies shouldn’t be rarer than gold.
The Weight recently played at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the Berlinale site for the title.
You might also like…
