“The Weight,” about a 1933 heist of gold bars from the Federal Reserve’s remote storage facility by inmates from a labor camp, is a lot of movies in one. First it’s a prison movie about a loner who becomes a leader. Then it’s a wilderness adventure filled with relentless action sequences, and a psychological thriller about men trying to manipulate other men to gain money or freedom. And from start to finish, it’s a political fable about capital and labor. It’s successful in every department.
But that last one is the most intriguing. A lot of movies flaunt a supposedly anti-authoritarian streak that runs no deeper than “Don’t tell me what to do.” “The Weight,” in contrast, is straightforwardly progressive–a movie that speaks to its time and ours. The best comparison point might not be another genre movie, but John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath and the subsequent John Ford film adaptation, which defined the Great Depression in cultural memory. The main character, Ethan Hawke‘s Samuel Murphy, might be Steinbeck’s plainspoken Tom Joad reimagined as an action hero who thinks before he acts, and can read a situation more plainly than anyone else who’s in it.
The story begins when Murphy, a recent widower with an outlaw’s spirit, gets evicted from the apartment he shared with his young daughter Penny (Avery Perry) and must find them a new place to live. In an alley with Penny. knocking on a prospective landlord’s door, three men storm in, demand to know what they’re doing, and warn them against “squatting.” The ensuing confrontation escalates into a brawl, with Murphy treating the men’s heads like punching bags. Turns out one of the men Murphy struck was a cop. The authorities put Penny in a home for wayward children and sentenced her father to one year in a work camp run by Warden Clancy (Russell Crowe), a bearded, thick-necked man who loves breaking other men’s spirits through intimidation, punishment, and the assignment of tasks he knows are impossible.
Then Clancy puts Murphy in charge of one such task, moving a boulder that, in his words, would defeat Hercules himself, and the movie shifts gears. Murphy surprises Clancy by taking charge and getting the job done with ingenuity, cracking the rock into sections by jamming metal tools into pre-drilled holes and force-lifting the larger fragments with what appears to be a jack. The scene echoes other famous scenes in genre fiction in which very different men bond by completing a strenuous task, such as the uprooting of a stump in “Shane” or the relocation of a rock pile in “The Last Castle.” Watching Murphy in action, Clancy realizes he’s a good leader with many useful skills who keeps his word and gets things done without fuss.
So he offers Murphy a mission: Then-president Franklin Delano Roosevelt had recently announced that, in an attempt to slow or halt the currency deflation that was prolonging the Depression, his administration had decided to take the United States off the gold standard, and began sending federal marshals around the country to withdraw gold held in vaults by the Federal Reserve Bank. Murphy will lead a team of inmates to steal the gold bars kept in a cave deep in the forest before the feds can take them, then bring them to Clancy, who will divide them between himself and his patrons. In return, Clancy will give the participating inmates early release papers dated to the moment they turn over the gold. Murphy can’t say no because Penny will be put up for adoption in five months, long before his sentence ends. “I want my daughter back,” he says simply.
Murphy’s team gathers lots of distinctive faces representing segments of the viewing public. Anna (Julie Jones) is an indigenous woman who ends up traveling with the crew and working as a cook and medic. A Eugene V. Debs-quoting Indian-American socialist named Singh (Avi Nash, a tremendous screen presence who lights his cigarettes like Burt Lancaster) is officially doing time for resisting arrest during a protest, but when another inmate says he was jailed “for being a Socialist,” he concedes that their description is more accurate. A Scandinavian immigrant named Olson (Lucas Lynggaad Tonnesen) is there for crimes committed while defending his community against native-born, immigrant hating land thieves and the town government they controlled. The troublemaker of the group is Rankin (Austin Amelio), a sneering jackass who bullies anyone he considers different while defending a status quo that holds down men like him, too, even though he doesn’t see it.
Finally, there are the crew’s armed handlers (Alec Newman and Jeffrey Lee Hallman), who are loyal to the warden and enjoy hurting people. All of these people are so well defined that you feel like you’ve gotten to know them even before they start walking through the forest with empty knapsacks. That knowledge gives you a sensitivity to small changes in the group’s dynamics. After a while, you start sizing everyone up the way Murphy does, looking for threats, weaknesses, and potential alliances.
Hawke’s performance is one of the best he’s ever given, and certainly the one least likely to have been predicted by a 1994 moviegoer who had just finished watching “Reality Bites.” First, there’s the voice: deep, gravelly, sometimes broken. This is a recent development in Hawke’s acting, and may be an unintended consequence of the Old Testament roar he created for John Brown in the miniseries “The Good Lord Bird.” It sometimes evokes the glass-shards-caught-in-a-garbage-disposal voices of certain characters Clint Eastwood played in the 1980s and ’90s. The rest of Hawke’s work here favors minimalism: see the thing, do the thing, feel the feeling, move on.
The mission to and from the gold storage facility is broken up by title cards (rendered in a modern New York Times headline font, strangely) telling us where we are in the timeline, but its sections could have just as easily been identified by their center of dramatic interest, which is always a challenge or contest: The Boulder, The Rope Bridge, The Rapids, The Boats, The Fight.
Director Padraic McKinley, a producer on “The Good Lord Bird” making his feature debut here, stages and shoots all the action with simplicity and force. Cinematographer Matteo Cocco is always in the perfect spot to capture a given image or action, and it’s rarely the obvious one that others would probably have chosen. The synthesized score, by Shelby and Latham Gaines, often stays in a long, bass-heavy hum that suspends our sense of time, so both the victories and defeats have epic heft even though these hardheaded characters would never think of them that way.
Mid-century action directors like Budd Boetticher (“The Tall T”) and Anthony Mann (“The Naked Spur”) used to crank out medium-sized, character-driven action pictures that felt like this one. They presented each major event in a direct, simple way, while also setting the stage for a nonliteral reading. Consider the scene where Murphy picks shotgun pellets from her bare back, describing each wound as he goes. Anna helps Murphy with his wounds as well. These scenes appreciate how fragile human bodies are. But they’re also coded sex scenes that fall where sex scenes with sex in them would normally be placed in a film like this. And they have a similar goal: to show that two characters trust each other enough to be completely vulnerable, in a situation where showing vulnerability is the equivalent of placing a target on one’s own back.
Some scenes in “The Weight” consist mainly of a long, unbroken close-up of Murphy listening to a nearby conversation he’s not part of, or sitting and thinking. They are among the most gripping moments in a film packed with prison picture mayhem and wilderness adventures, thanks entirely to Hawke’s careworn face and hard stare. The action sequences are so effective that the movie didn’t need to give us so many moments of Murphy getting lost in thought. But these moments are a big reason why the movie feels more substantive than a lot of other action pictures about manly men doing manly things.
Like Eastwood (and Keanu Reeves in the “John Wick” movies), Hawke understands that in movie acting, sometimes the best approach is to shut up and let your face do the talking. His performance anchors the drama and grounds the action, reaffirming that every part of the mission is dangerous and the stakes are real. Just when you start to worry that the movie is veering away from real-world believability (like when Murphy devises a gold bar version of a water bucket brigade, to get around the problem of the rope bridge being too unstable to support a group carrying massively heavy knapsacks), he makes sure it stays on the right track. Hawke is our guy from frame one. His keen judgment keeps a heavy movie light on its feet.
