After the death of his wife, Samuel Murphy (Ethan Hawke) uses his handyman and mechanical skills honed during his service in World War I to keep a roof over his and his young daughter, Penny’s (Avy Berry), head. Despite his efforts, he is evicted one Sunday morning while at church, and while searching in town for a job and a place to rent, he is picked up by plainclothes policemen charging him with intent to squat. He is sentenced to a convict labor camp, toiling to clear the mountainous land for a new highway where J. J. Clancey (Russell Crowe), the warden, takes a liking to him and offers him a dangerous opportunity to secure his freedom.
Padraic McKinley delivers The Weight from Vertical as his directorial debut after a resume built on television. Matthew Booi and Shelby Gaines pen the 113-minute Great Depression era set dramatic thriller which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival and was granted a short theatrical run on just over 1,500 screens. Released in the wasteland between Blockbuster and Prestige season, The Weight is through and through the kind of small to medium budget films that get to highlight the craft of, and point to, a thriving industry.
The film opens in the midst of a furious getaway as we are in the back seat of Samuel’s car, barreling down a dusty country road. As Matteo Cocco pulls the camera back, we realize that it is Penny in the back seat with us, and Samuel is simply treating his daughter to a fun and imaginative drive back home. Questionable driving decisions aside, McKinley is using the implied language of cinema to paint Samuel as a well to do father who will stop at nothing for his family well before any threats to them have even sprung up in the narrative. This opening scene allows Hawke to get all of the emotional heavy lifting that will be required by him out of the way so that he can later focus his performance on being, for lack of a better word, the action star of the film. Without this opening sequence, he would be little more than a flat, one dimensional archetype of a character, but even without this sequence that helps us root for Samuel across the runtime, Hawke brings a charm to the role that makes him immediately likeable and someone who we find ourselves falling in line behind almost without even realizing it is happening in the moment.
The film begins to come alive in the second half of the first act as Samuel finds his place in the prison camp and gets in the good graces with Clancey. Again, this is a testament to Hawke’s charm and ability to suss out the integrity of his characters, as the Leatherman multitool aspect of Samuel which is well on display here could easily consume many other performers who would be unable to find a throughline for this man who has hit rock bottom but refuses to yield. After keeping the crew on schedule, Clancey offers Samuel a chance at freedom if he and three men of his choosing transport the gold from nearby Klamath Falls to a drop point some six-day journey through the woods away.
To assist him on this task, he recruits fellow inmates Singh (Avi Nash), a socialist sympathizer, Olson (Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen), a Swedish immigrant farmer, and Rankin (Austin Amelio), a white supremacist; one of these things is not like the other. The actual heist of the gold is pretty straightforward as the four men pack their bags full of the bars and sneak out of the encampment under the waning darkness of dawn. Once in the woods, the band, overseen by prison security guards Amis (Sam Hazeldine) and Letender (George Burgess) quickly sense that they are being followed. Samuel, again getting to flaunt his military prowess is allowed to fall back, and sure enough, discovers Anna (Julia Jones), an indigenous woman traveling solo, hot on their tail. Her excuse for following is not particularly clear – just one of the many instances where the scriptwriting team waves off some of the more minute details in favor of a more broad wash of understanding – but after some convincing, she is allowed to continue her journey with the men.
The soft scripting is the major flaw of an otherwise taught and enjoyable outdoors thriller because as soon as any plot point or character development is recalled for anytime past the immediate scene, it falls apart under the slightest of scrutiny. Beyond the founding conceit that Clancey, as warden, could ,with the stroke of his pen could commute and pardon the sentences of the four men upon successful completion of the drop which does a lot of heavy lifting to set the bar of acceptance and the suspension of disbelief required for the film to make sense, it shows us time and again across the narrative as the thinness of the supporting cast is slowly exposed. Each one has a moment where we can glean some understanding of their past, but it mostly seems inconsequential which is only a problem because The Weight is such a character driven drama instead of an action thriller.
Admittedly, it does weaken the overall impact of the film, especially because it seems as if Booi and Gaines are trying to draw some parallels with modern day the salt of the earth, backbone segments of our country who, like Samuel, are similarly finding their way of life increasingly under threat by a government that does not respect its farmers, its immigrants, its veterans, and seeks to squash out anyone who dares point out that the American Dream is slowly being pulled out of reach from the everyday citizen in favor of expanded capitalism and pseudo-monopolies. That the film then includes a white supremacist in this band of outlaws, but is seemingly afraid to outright condemn his actions as it does to rationalize the righteous disobedience of the other three does present itself as an odd gap. Instead, the script allows Rankin to constantly antagonize the group, but the group – and by extension, the scriptwriters – are seemingly afraid to punch back. Sure, The Weight is not trying to be a moral tale, but the sheer unevenness of how it handles its characters does become strangely apparent over time.
The only time it becomes a major issue in the narrative, though, is unfortunately a pivotal set piece where the men have to transport the gold over a rickety more-hole-than-bridge which spans a dangerous ravine. Their solution is to toss the bars, one by one, to Samuel who is stationed in the middle of the bridge, who then throws the bars across the other half to the further bank. The sheer ridiculousness of the plan is second only to the continued flawless execution of the plan which finds Samuel absolutely battered and out of breath after successfully catching and heaving each and every brick of gold to the awaiting bank. For a character who, until this point, we have seen time and time again prove his above average ingenuity, this sequence is – ha! – a bridge too far for many audiences, though thankfully the film rebounds shortly thereafter as they continue their journey deep into the heart of darkness.
It is in the darkness where the film is at its most successful and these men are met with their breaking point in two standout sequences that offer up real horror and sharp filmmaking from McKinley. The first of these sequences comes shortly after the crossing of the bridge and help the film rebound as we find the band forced to cross the river by floating the gold across using makeshift rafts. Upstream, however, a logging company has cleared a jam, and the timber is making its way down to the prisoners with all the fury of the river. Much later, and a feather in the cap of Matthew Woolley and McKinley who joint-edited the film, is a nighttime thunderstorm in which Cocco’s camera sits at a distance from an injured Olson, resting in darkness under a tree. In between cracks of thunder and torrents of rain, we witness the guards murder the now-deadweight on the crew in flashes of lightning. The scene is long, but it feels even longer as we witness the ruthlessness of a government going to great lengths to protecting its profits. To call it simply that is adding undue cynicism which the script is not fully committed to peddling in, but even on a black and white narrative level, the sequence is equally affecting and unnerving.
In the tradition of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953) and William Friedkin‘s Sorcerer (1977), The Weight, coming in much shorter than both, brings the story to the wilds of the great American North West with a cast of men destitute in the midst of the Great Depression. The change from traversing in truck to on foot adds a new set of challenges to the familiar arc, and the unique struggles of the men at the front of the drama also bring new angles to the classic story. There is a stronger sense of resilience here which helps us latch on to these characters, and even though they are a little uneven, we are provided enough information to empathize with their struggles, especially as many of them have been imprisoned on rather vague pretense. These quibbles aside, The Weight is still a thoroughly enjoyable film and a great effort by McKinley who, along with the screenwriting team, thankfully shook off the temptation to turn this into a six-episode, overwritten and superfluous Netflix miniseries and instead delivered a taught and engaging wilderness thriller that became one of the little gems that gives the act of going to the cinema that special, magic feeling.
