Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe’s The Weight evokes classic greed and desperation thrillers
Courtesy Vertical
The new dramatic thriller The Weight is the movie that finally dares to ask the question “What if you combined The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Wages of Fear, and the rope bridge scene from Sorcerer but also mixed in Train Dreams?”
Oh, were you not asking that question? That’s OK, neither was I.
Fortunately for director Padraic McKinley, writers Matthew Booi, Matthew Chapman, Shelby Gaines and Leo Scherman, and stars Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe (that’s a lot of names for a small indie movie), all the aforementioned influences are fantastic. They also have compatible themes: Economic desperation, greed, class divides and guilt over having to be far away from the people you love in order to provide for them.
With the exception of a couple of strange choices that hit right at the end of The Weight, it turns out smooshing all of these themes together into a taut, high-stakes thriller results in a pretty good time. The Weight has nail-biting sequences, guys with interesting faces, dramatic landscapes and lots of sweaty folks carrying heavy rucksacks through a forest and stoically refusing to talk to each other. It’s a lean (mostly) unsentimental thriller of the kind we haven’t had much of since the 70s.
Widowed dad Samuel Murphy (Hawke) is struggling to provide for his adorable daughter Penny (Avy Berry) in the Depression-era Pacific Northwest. When a search for a rentable room results in an alley fight, Murphy lands in jail, and Penny in state custody. Murphy is put on a road construction crew run by pompous hard-ass Clancy (Crowe), who quickly notices that Murphy, a former engineer and war veteran, is a smart dude and practically fearless.
Clancy approaches Murphy with a proposition. A local government-run gold mine is wary of a spate of nearby robberies, and the proprietor wants to move some of their bars off-site for “safe keeping.” If Murphy and three other men carry that gold across miles of rocky, unforgiving terrain to a drop site, they’ll all be allowed to walk free.
Murphy and his chosen guys—socialist provocateur Singh (Avi Nash), ex-farmer Olson (Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen), and resident smartass Rankin (Austin Amelio)—don’t trust the two mine guards walking alongside them. They barely trust Anna (Julia Jones), a mine worker who volunteers to carry a pack to get out of her contract with the company. Unfortunately, they all have to rely on each other to stay alive, even as everyone’s motives get shiftier.
Heavy sacks of gold aren’t the terrifying nitroglycerin cargo of The Wages of Fear and Sorcerer, but they carry their own threat. A rotting rope bridge requires the most intense game of “hot potato” ever devised to safely get the carriers and their gold across without breaking. A water crossing becomes heart-poundingly intense when Murphy realizes a bunch of felled trees from a logging company are racing down the river towards the group. Sorcerer wastes no time offing its doomed characters, but here it’s important everyone stay alive—if someone goes down, everyone else has to take on their burden.
Courtesy Vertical
All that danger is expertly conveyed by Shelby and Latham Gaines’ droning, evocative score, which sounds like a night spent in a haunted forest with guys who might (or might not) slit your throat. The dynamic is also aided by McKinley, a producer on Hawke’s The Good Lord Bird, who has a good handle on conversations between rangy dudes out in the wilderness who’d probably rather be somewhere else.
The movie’s tone is pitch-perfect until an upbeat ending with an incongruent needle drop that feels tacked on. It’s the one wrong step in a movie that otherwise doesn’t put a foot out of line. Unfortunately, like the rope bridge scene early on in the group’s journey, this isn’t a situation where you can afford to falter. That choice doesn’t necessarily tank the whole enterprise, but it does make it significantly less effective.
The Weight is still worth checking out, and worth seeing on a big screen at Glenwood Arts, where it opens this weekend. But you can’t help but wish it had the guts to stay in the compromised, uncertain dark.
