Things were tough all over in 1933. For Samuel Murphy (Ethan Hawke), life is especially hard. A widower with a young daughter (Avy Berry), he’s trying to find steady work. Murphy’s a whiz with cars, both fixing them and driving them fast, yet those skills
only mean so much when the Great Depression is threatening to turn Eugene, Oregon, into a ghost town. They’ve just been evicted from their apartment, coming home from church to find all of their worldly possessions on the stairs. Their spirits are close to broken, but at the least they have each other.
Then Murphy takes a swing at a cop when the flatfoot harasses the two of them during a misunderstanding in an alleyway, and he’s arrested. The doting father promises to find his kid and get her out of foster care ASAP. He’s sentenced to do hard time in a rural work camp, a chain gang minus the shackles. Breaking rocks in the hot sun, Murphy inadvertently fought the law, and the law won. Our man just keeps his head down and counts the hours.
Luckily — or maybe unluckily — the camp’s warden, a hardbitten guy with an oily smile named Clancy (Russell Crowe, hardbitten, smiley, and oily), takes a liking to Murphy. Over a cold Dr. Pepper and a slug of whiskey, the bossman proposes a quid pro quo: A heap of gold bricks from a nearby mining camp are about to be requisitioned by F.D.R.’s feds as emergency resources. If the convict can help transport the loot from that camp to a safe space far from the government’s prying eyes, the warden will punch his get-outta-jail-free card. Murphy can see his little girl that much sooner. All he has to do is gather a group of reliable, or at least reliable-ish, men from among his fellow prisoners and, under the eyes of two armed chaperones, walk the gold through the Oregonian wilderness over a six-day period. It won’t be easy, Clancy says. Spoiler: It’s not. Cue frayed rope bridges, white-water rapids, dodgy hillbilly strangers, and good old-fashioned betrayal, corporate greed, and the evil that men do.
The Walter Hill vibes are close to 150-proof strong in The Weight, director Padraic McKinley’s glorious throwback of a survivalist thriller that pits its star and a host of other character actors in a race against time and a pissed-off Mother Nature. You can pick out a host of Seventies cinematic signposts along the way — a bit of Hard Times here, a smidge of Deliverance there, a whole lotta William Friedkin’s Sorcerer — as well as a long legacy of Westerns, man-vs.-the-elements potboilers, and vintage he-man pulp fiction. Hawke namechecked Paul Newman and Cool Hand Luke in the press shortly after this rough nugget of a film premiered at Sundance, but the actor is really channeling a different type of Golden Age and New Hollywood star. It’s like he’s trying to fuse Treasure of the Sierra Madre-era Humphrey Bogart and early Charles Bronson into one stoic, sinewy-antihero frame.
Hawke and McKinley worked together on The Good Lord Bird — the latter was an executive producer; this is his debut feature as a director — and that stellar TV limited series represented the height of Hawke’s scenery-chewing talents. His Murphy is a complete 180 from that wild-eyed take on the abolitionist John Brown, not to mention a fine addition to the canon of good men who find themselves in bad company and have to navigate, pivot, and play along accordingly. Strong, silent types suit Hawke, and like his fellow prematurely grizzled thespian Josh Brolin, Hawke has long morphed out of his bohemian pretty-boy phase and aged into someone who can convince you he’s seen some shit.
The Weight does give him a great showcase to deliver someone with a strategist’s survival instinct that hides beneath a purposefully blank stare, as well as indulge what we’d guess is he and McKinley’s shared love of the Me Decade’s grittier, morally ambiguous screen fare. It’s the type of movie where you can smell the fear and the rotgut hooch coming out of the characters’ pores. But this isn’t a vanity project, and the wealth get shared in terms of screen time and idiosyncratic performances. Murphy’s fellow cons are a ragtag bunch that includes Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen’s gentle giant of a Swede, Avi Nash’s anarcho-socialist, and The Walking Dead‘s Austin Amelio playing what we can only describe as an Austin Amelio type: wired, shifty, and extremely punchable. Wind River‘s Julia Jones shows up as a Native woman who joins the pack, and holds her own against obstacles ranging from raging rivers to even-more-raging men. And as the polite but menacing warden, Russell Crowe reminds you yet again why his headshot should be next to the phrase “glowering screen heavy” in the dictionary. His villain’s obsession with baseball is also a nice quirky touch.
No, this film is not a perfect homage to 1970s tough-guy action flicks. (There’s a genuinely WTF anachronistic needledrop at the very end that runs the risk of literally boggling your mind.) But The Weight is close enough to give you that same thrill you get when, say, an old-timey James Coburn or Lee Marvin movie unexpectedly show up on TCM. It desperately wants to be your grandfather’s Great Depression survivalist thriller, and is willing to go the extra 100 miles and brave seriously rough-looking terrain to do it. That alone makes it worth it’s you-know-what in retro-cinema du testosterone gold.
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