He is certainly not a superhero, but nevertheless, there’s something slightly preternatural about Samuel Murphy (Ethan Hawke), the protagonist of The Weight. It’s in how the man seems to understand intuitively how machines operate and, from there, how systems and institutions work, too. If he only had to contend with the predictability of those machines and systems and institutions, he might have been better off than how director Padraic McKinley’s film finds him, but then, this is a world with other people in it.
He does also, at least, know when other people are selling him a lot of nonsense (he uses an earthier phrase), so if we are to combine that quality with the other one detailed above, perhaps he is actually cut out for the task set before him, which theoretically involves a simple delivery over a lot of rough terrain. Obviously, there’s nothing at all simple about this delivery—not the cargo, not the other men involved, certainly not the terms on which he agreed to make this delivery. Samuel has every reason to agree to those terms, but then, we return to the thing where, crucially, he can read other people—up to a certain point.
The nature of this character is at the broken heart of McKinley’s film, which takes place in 1933—just four years into the Great Depression and two years before then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt rounded up all the gold in the United States to be stored in the Bullion Depository of Fort Knox. Following a crime that actually feels a lot more like having been railroaded, Samuel is separated from his daughter (played by Avy Berry) and incarcerated to work as a prison laborer for a tough but fair warden named Clancy (Russell Crowe). Proving himself to be resourceful to the others after moving a boulder in minutes, rather than days, Clancy promises to sign off on his time in prison and set him free if he’ll do one big favor.
The delivery is—you guessed it—a certain amount of gold from one place to a safer place on behalf of greedy men who would rather not turn it over, namely Taggert (Alec Newman). With the help of some other prisoners, the job should be simple enough, if treacherous in its terrain, but obviously, these other men have their own ideas about each other, the cargo they’re carrying, and the politics of the time. One of them, for instance, is an immigrant named Singh (Avi Nash), and as soon as it clicks that this must be one of the immigrants interned under Roosevelt’s mandate (rumors abound of his being a “socialist,” which is a claim that echoes into our present), we sort of understand what’s going on with him.
There is also a young Scandinavian man, Olson (Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen), who dreams of seeing his wife and children again and Rankin (Austin Amelio), a man whose politics are, well, more traditional than these others. The character that truly matters here, though, is Samuel, who is apolitical but not in the sense that usually comes to mind. He has a singular goal, which is to get back to his daughter, and nearly everything else is but a distraction from that end.
This is a fascinating act of threading a needle on the part of McKinley and screenwriters Matthew Booi and Shelby Gaines, because it means that the subtly political backdrop never entirely goes away. It also never forces itself upon the characters or the plot, which becomes a series of backstabbings and betrayals and brazen acts of self-preservation. That sometimes involves suspense sequences, such as a particularly tense one on a rickety wooden bridge that can only handle so much weight.
It mostly involves the constant sense of danger that lurks behind every tree, underneath any rock, and mostly within the hearts of these greedy men, as well as others like a mysterious one (played by Cameron Brady) whom they meet in the deep of the forest. Still others, like Clancy’s main lackey Amis (Sam Hazeldine) and his galumphing enforcer (played by George Burgess), have even more obvious motives. The very air seems thick with deceit.
It does, too, involve a climax that relies a touch too much upon an explosion of action, a getaway car, and a lot of gunfights and physical threats to resolve its various pieces of plot. In another way, though, perhaps the inevitability of the action here is part of the point and even an extension upon the character at the center of this story. Samuel believes himself to be wholly dependent upon these systems to survive, and the intrusions upon that security—the fidelity of the other men to the plan, the final revelation of what’s really going on, the involvement of a new character played by Julia Jones—are both predictable, like the systems he knows so well, and almost Shakespearean.
After all, it’s a movie about characters who get what’s coming to them, sometimes unfairly and often out of a sense of cosmic irony. Hawke’s performance, all quiet clockwork and rugged determination, is paired perfectly with the material in The Weight, an absorbing Depression-era thriller that has a bit more on its mind than thrills.
Rating: ***½ (out of ****)
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