Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Padraic McKinley
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Russell Crowe, Julia Jones, Austin Amelio, Avi Nash, Sam Hazeldine
The success of 1967's Bonnie & Clyde had a seismic impact on Hollywood. Over the following decade American movies would become increasingly explicit in their depictions of violence, and unambiguous heroes were rapidly replaced by a new wave of anti-heroes as the "crime doesn't pay" ethos of the Hays Code was ripped up. Arthur Penn's movie also inspired an obsession with the Great Depression that fuelled much of Hollywood's output throughout the late '60s and '70s. Movies like The Sting, Paper Moon, Boxcar Bertha, Thieves Like Us, Hard Times and Emperor of the North were focussed on victims of the Depression doing whatever they could to survive.
Padraic McKinley's directorial debut The Weight is a throwback to the Depression obsession of '70s Hollywood. With an absence of any obvious digital effects and the sort of rugged filmmaking that is quickly becoming a thing of the past, it might easily be mistaken for a product of that era.
Ethan Hawke has proved himself a highly versatile actor in recent years, convincing in roles as diverse as songwriter Lorenz Hart in Blue Moon, the titular inventor of Tesla and the demonic serial killer of the Black Phone movies. But Hawke is most naturally convincing when he is asked to portray an everyman. There is something about Hawke's screen persona that exudes decency, and his natural state is one of trustworthiness. He might be our modern day Henry Fonda, and this makes him the perfect choice to play The Weight's protagonist, a decent man surrounded by indecency.
It's 1933 and Hawke is Samuel Murphy, a man who is good with his hands but has been left with nothing to fix in a time when few can afford to run a car. Unable to pay rent, Murphy and his young daughter Penny (Avy Berry) are evicted from their home. In a moment that will have you reaching for the tissues, poor Penny sells her favourite teddy bear to help out her old man. While enquiring about a new place to rent, Murphy is set upon a group of men. It's only after he fights back that the men reveal themselves to be undercover cops. Murphy is sent to a labour camp while Penny is taken away and placed in temporary foster care.
Determined to be reunited with his daughter as soon as possible, Murphy keeps his head down and gets on with his work. His serious-minded ethic attracts the attention of the warden Clancy (Russell Crowe), who offers Murphy a chance at early release. Along with three other convicts - Rankin (Austin Amelio), Singh (Avi Nash) and Olson (Lucas Lynggaad Tonnesen) - Murphy is tasked with taking a mining company's consignment of gold through the Oregon wilderness before FDR's government can get its hands on it. The men are accompanied by two of the mining company's lackeys (George Burgess, Sam Hazeldine) and reluctantly joined by Anna (Julia Jones) a Native American who wishes to flee the mine and so blackmails the men into taking her along.
Playing out like The Wages of Fear on foot, The Weight sees its ragtag band of desperadoes negotiate a series of challenges posed by both nature and their fellow man. The scenario relies on recognisable tropes to a certain degree, with Rankin and the mining company's men proving increasingly untrustworthy and a danger to Murphy's life, but sometimes clichés just work, and that's the case here. Murphy is the audience's cypher, and we can feel his stress as he deals with a mix of incompetence and duplicitousness from the men in his company.
The film's low budget means it can't pull off any set-pieces on the scale of William Friedkin's Wages of Fear remake Sorcerer, but it does a lot with little. There is a fantastic rope bridge sequence that convinces us Hawke was actually endangering his life, and if any CG was deployed (it presumably was) it's invisible. Younger viewers accustomed to the bombastic finales of modern action movies may find The Weight's underplayed final act anti-climactic, but for those of us who yearn for simpler times when action movies didn't have to end with overblown 40-minute battles, this is a refreshing return to the days when engaging character dynamics and believably rugged action took precedence over empty digital spectacle.
The Weight is in UK/ROI cinemas from October 2nd.
