movie review
THE WEIGHT
Running time: 112 minutes. Not yet rated.
PARK CITY, Utah — Ethan Hawke is no stranger to action thrills, having starred in “The Magnificent Seven” and “The Purge,” among other gun-toting films over a long and varied career.
But that his unforgiving 1930s badass in “The Weight” arrives so soon after he brilliantly played a bald, bisexual, sensitive, short, witty Broadway lyricist in the intimate “Blue Moon,” comes off like a mesmerizing magician’s trick. Now you see me, now you don’t.
His latest, which premiered Monday at the Sundance Film Festival, is an effective sad-venture movie set during the Great Depression about a hardened prisoner in an Oregon work camp named Samuel Murphy, who gets the coveted chance to reunite with his little daughter.
All Murphy’s gotta do is transport five backpacks full of of gold bars with the help of three other men — plus two brutish overseers — 50 miles over six days through the forest to a dropoff point. Easy, right?
Not so much. Temptation, nature’s wrath and murderous rogues in the woods get in between the dogged man and his freedom. His journey is brisk and engrossing.
Directed by Padraic McKinley, “The Weight” has a simple construct we’ve seen many times before, and the film doesn’t set out to upend it.
However, familiar though it is, the skillfully made movie finds vigor in the been-there-done-that. The well-worn path is pepped up by the artful use of the vast wilderness (which is actually Germany). Chopped down logs hurdling down the river are an unusual and deadly threat. Lightning illuminates a killing like a horror strobe light.
And the film’s indie status, forcing the filmmakers to take the tactile route, lends “The Weight” a ruggedness that its polished studio brethren in this genre so often lack.
A fine example comes during its best scene when the crew — Rankin (Austin Amelio), Singh (Avi Nash) and Olson (Lucas Lynggaad Tonnesen) — encounters a rotting rope bridge. The gold is too heavy to lug across it, so Murphy stands in the middle on a creaky plank as they throw bricks to him.
The edge-of-your-seat sequence is genuinely alarming without relying on any of the cheap tricks usually used to freak out viewers. The risk feels real, like Nik Wallenda walking the tight rope over Niagara Falls, and we worry not only for his life, but for the valuable metal that could plummet to the bottom.
Murphy has a solution for seemingly every roadblock, and his “MacGyver” quality keeps him an enigma till the very end. Where did he learn all this? Why is this relatively skinny guy such a skilled brawler?
Earlier at the work camp, he impresses the warden (Russell Crowe) by figuring out how to move a giant boulder using just a couple sticks and small stones. Plus, he fixes his broken-down car.
That’s how crafty Murphy gets the assignment to haul the precious cargo for the warden’s friend, a shady mine owner who wants to prevent the government from confiscating the gold on orders from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The others on the trek are less layered or intriguing aside from Anna (Julia Jones), a Native American who joins them against the wishes of some and proves invaluable. Jones is striking in the part.
Sans much detail, it’s the group members’ attitudes that keep them engaging.
For instance, the person we assume is going to be the trouble-making villain actually isn’t. And Murphy is not as invulnerable as he appears.
“The Weight” isn’t as deep for Hawke as “Blue Moon” was. With a hoarse, threatening voice and mean glare, he’s pretty much the Eagle Scout version of Liam Neeson in “Taken.”
What it shows though is he’s an actor with so much variety to mine.
