Photo: Courtesy of Sundance Institute
Think of it as The Wages of Fear (or Sorcerer, if you prefer) but on foot. Padraic McKinley’s The Weight is a Depression-era thriller about a group of prisoners who must transport backpacks full of gold bars through the forests of Oregon. That may not sound all that dramatic, but McKinley establishes just the right amount of physical and emotional stakes, and a cast led by Ethan Hawke infuses the drama with believable camaraderie, conflict, and tension. It’s the kind of atmospheric, exciting period drama we don’t really get much anymore.
We’re invested right from the start as the film begins with an infuriating miscarriage of justice. After they’re evicted without warning, hard-working widower Samuel Murphy (Hawke) and his young daughter, Penny (Avy Berry), are accosted by cops while trying to find a new place. Penny is taken away, and Murphy winds up at a prisoner work camp led by the baseball-loving, vaguely sadistic warden Clancy (Russell Crowe). Murphy, a gifted mechanic and a veteran of the Great War, immediately stands out to Clancy as a tough-minded, industrious guy. Murphy has another six months to go in the camp, but in one month, Penny will become a ward of the state. Learning of the man’s predicament, Clancy offers him a deal: Pick three fellow inmates and transport this gold out of a nearby mining encampment and across 50 miles of treacherous wilderness, and Clancy will sign Murphy’s papers for immediate release. Lose even a single gold bar, however, and all of them will be killed.
Now, we can probably poke holes in this premise all night long. But McKinley seduces us into a world that feels fully lived in, and the story doesn’t hand-wave away the details. Murphy’s engineering know-how gets put on display pretty convincingly, and there’s actual historical context for the gold transfer. (In 1933, as part of his efforts to combat the Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order that forbade most private ownership of gold and closed down the mines.) This is confident storytelling, effectively pulling us in because the filmmakers appear to have done their research. Add to all that Murphy’s overwhelming drive to get back to his daughter before she’s adopted away, and the urgency of the situation crystallizes rapidly. Murphy gathers the three inmates he’s become closest to — socialist firebrand Singh (Avi Nash), unpredictable chatterbox gambler Rankin (Austin Amelio), and burly Scandinavian farmer Olson (Lucas Lynggaard Tonnesen) — and they set off on their perilous trek through the wilderness, watched over by two armed goons (Sam Hazeldine and Jeffrey Lee Hallman) ready to kill them if anything goes amiss.
The obstacles emerge organically from the landscape. At one point, the men run into a log drive — a battalion of lumber sent down a raging river for easy transport — and we get that great survival-thriller element: something that seems so innocuous at first and turns out to be unthinkably terrifying once you realize the danger. Also, who doesn’t love a rope-bridge scene? All along the way, the absurd weight of the gold bars adds both an extra layer to the physical challenges involved and a gentle frisson of symbolism. Matteo Cocco’s cinematography captures the wilderness in all its otherworldly foreboding, which also lends a certain existential gravity to these men’s ordeal.
The Weight works marvelously whenever it’s in survival-thriller mode. Toward the end, when the time comes for some action climaxes, it can be a little confusing and rushed: McKinley relies on tighter shots and faster editing, which enhance such scenes’ visceral qualities but can also feel like the director’s otherwise assured footing slipping a little. But by that point, we’re already in so deep with these characters and their gripping predicament that we’re breathless to find out how it all turns out. See this one with an audience.
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