Ethan Hawke has long since moved beyond the precocious-slacker persona of his early career, settling into more mature, weathered roles. In The Weight, though, he may be slightly old to play the father of a girl around five or six. The film takes place in Depression-era 1933, and Hawke, now 55, would be well beyond the average life expectancy for someone born around the turn of the century, as his character presumably was.
Still, Hawke hardly looks 55 in The Weight. Playing Samuel Murphy, a prisoner sent to a labor camp on a bogus assault charge after the seemingly innocent act of knocking on a side door at a building advertising an available apartment, he appears hollow-cheeked but physically resilient enough to endure months of punishing work. His eyes, however, carry the burden suggested by the title. A widower, Samuel is determined to earn time off through good behavior and get back to his daughter Penny (Avy Berry), who faces foster placement after his arrest and offscreen conviction. When warden Clancy (Russell Crowe)—not quite sadistic, but hardly merciful—offers Samuel a dubious deal that could immediately reduce his sentence, refusing is not really an option.
That assignment supplies both the tension and the old-fashioned entertainment of The Weight, a Sundance title arriving in wide but understated release this weekend. It is the sort of polished, adult-oriented thriller viewers may stumble across on streaming six, 12, or 18 months from now, drawn by Hawke and especially Crowe, and wonder why it escaped their attention. Better to find it now and see it on the big screen: it is among the year’s best films so far.
The plot has the sturdy, muscular feel of a Clint Eastwood picture from the mid-to-late 1970s, landing somewhere between Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and Escape from Alcatraz. Clancy orders Murphy to choose a dependable crew—Rankin (Austin Amelio), Singh (Avi Nash), and Olson (Lucas Lynggaard Tonnesen) are seemingly his only viable choices—to transport gold bricks through the wilderness before President Roosevelt’s impending mining seizure. Two more thugs accompany them, and the group eventually takes in Anna (Julia Jones), an Indigenous woman who spots the travelers early and becomes valuable in protecting them. The film largely follows their dangerous trek, with shades of The Treasure of Sierra Madre and Sorcerer, including a nerve-rattling rickety crossing. Its neo-Western ingredients—gold, outlaws, and an Indigenous woman—are shifted into a greener, more enclosed landscape.
Director Padraic McKinley makes strong use of that landscape through carefully staged group shots, positioning the men within the frame and placing the camera to hold them together in a single image. Those compositions gradually enlarge the film beyond its straightforward, meat-and-potatoes premise, allowing the forest setting to take on a quiet poetry. The location need not appear exotic to feel vivid: although filmed in Germany as a stand-in for Oregon, the production makes full use of its outdoor locations. Italian cinematographer Matteo Cocco gives the images a tactile, dirt-under-the-fingernails quality.
The shared bird names of Hawke and Crowe will undoubtedly help bring audiences in. Hawke has shaped his middle-aged screen presence into something unexpectedly flinty for an actor who first became famous as the handsome face of insufferability in Reality Bites. Many performers might push too hard on Samuel’s desperation to reclaim his child. Hawke conveys the character’s love and terror in just a few scenes with his on-screen daughter, then lets that fear remain visible in his eyes throughout the movie. There is something both strange and thrilling about watching him take on a role Eastwood might have played at the same age, while bringing a grounded sensitivity that Eastwood would have deliberately held at a distance.
Crowe has considerably less screen time, since Clancy’s entire scheme depends on making prisoners do the dangerous work for him. Yet he understands precisely how to make a villainous—or at least deeply flawed—character compelling without turning him into a caricature: charismatic without becoming slick, threatening without going broad. The actors’ relatively few scenes together are expertly played.
It would be easy to oversell The Weight, which is ultimately more interested in telling a gripping story than delivering grand statements about Depression-era America, fatherhood, or prison corruption. But it would be even easier for audiences to overlook a finely made movie like this. Don’t. If Resident Evil is not your thing—or even if it is and you want to keep your moviegoing momentum going—seek out The Weight while it can still be experienced on a big screen.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.