The Weight, from first time director (but long time editor and producer) Padraic McKinley, is being heralded as a “throwback” movie akin to great thrillers like Sorcerer or Wages of Fear, but beyond the basic premise of moving precious material through a dangerous landscape, that comparison does not hold up.
First, The Weight isn’t going to be remembered as much as those films, but more importantly, it’s not trying to be those films. It’s less about the perilous journey of Ethan Hawke’s character and more about his willingness to do whatever it takes to gain his freedom.
The Weight takes place during the heart of the Depression, and it feels like it. Misery pervades the opening of the film as single-father Hawke tries to make ends meet to support his daughter. We first meet them having fun during a feigned car chase (foreshadowing, anyone?). They’re having fun and clearly love each other. But the fun ends quickly as a sequence of events leaves them homeless, and Hawke ends up on a chain-gang. The boss of the chain-gang, Russell Crowe, strikes a deal with Hawke. If he can help a local mine owner steal his own gold before the government seizes it, he can have his freedom.
Hawke and Crowe work well together, and their scenes are the film’s most memorable. But this is not the two-hander the previews and poster make it seem to be. This is Hawke’s film, and Crowe is a footnote in it. Don’t get me wrong, Hawke is great, as usual. He looks the part, and you truly believe his desperation. But it would have been even better had Crowe been more of a foil to his character. I wanted a scene-chewing villainous turn from Crowe, but instead we get a handful of scenes of him as just being kind of a bad guy. It’s understated, and I simply don’t want that from Crowe these days.
With Crowe out of the film, The Weight is primarily about a group of prisoners moving backpacks of gold through the wilds of the Pacific Northwest. And while it looks beautiful and old-timey (the cinematographer was clearly a fan of the blurred edges of The Assassination of Jesse James), it’s not very thrilling. There is a moment on a rope bridge that is the film’s one moment that attempts to be Sorcerer, but I found it more silly than harrowing.
Hawke, the visuals, and the stakes of the film just weren’t enough for me to ignore some issues I had with the plot and melodrama. With the melodrama, some moments at the beginning were simply corny in their presentation of the Depression with the little girl deciding to sell her teddy bear. And the moment she’s taken away from Hawke goes on far too long. It’s a necessary scene, but the moment with Hawke in the cell after she is gone is enough to convey what has just happened to him. It’s as if the film doesn’t trust Hawke to portray that emotion, so a soap opera-esque scene plays out first.
Once I start pulling at threads with The Weight, a lot of it falls apart. The basic premise didn’t work. The mine owner claims he can’t trust any of his own men to take the gold, but then he sends…two of his own men with the crew to make sure they don’t steal it? And the plan is to meet up with the men and load up the gold in a car; so why not just take the gold in a car from the mine in the middle of the night or something? I get that there is no movie without the need to move the gold, but they didn’t put enough thought into why it had to be done this way. I just spent the whole movie waiting for Crowe to show up again.
And that was the biggest issue overall. This could have been an exceptional movie with Hawke and Crowe going head-to-head in the chain gang. Crowe mentions baseball a lot because he fields a team with his inmates. This would have been more interesting if that was the focus of the film and a Longest Yard situation played out with Hawke having to win his freedom on the baseball field. I mean, if we’re going to try to be like a better classic film, why not go with a fun one?
This is a lot of complaining, but only because The Weight had a lot of potential that didn’t pay off. Take all those expectations off of it, and you’re left with a perfectly fine and simple film with plenty of emotion and harrowing moments. Perhaps it's my fault for wanting something else from the film. With this talent, though, I want something special worthy of the big screen. Instead, this is destined to be an “okay” movie people half-watch on streaming while scrolling on their phones, which, I suppose, is a fitting legacy of a film this Depression-coded.
Random Thoughts
Perhaps I’m being too harsh on a film that I didn’t really hate. It’s just that I’m seeing some glowing blurbs and Letterboxd entries for this claiming it’s a modern classic, and it’s just not. I try not to even look at stuff like that before I write a review, but it’s a little overwhelming for this one, and I’m suspecting it’s more about marketing than it is real opinions from real people. I’m not saying people who love this aren’t real. They are, and I’m glad this worked for them so much, but the five star reviews and hyperbolic blurbs are far too numerous for a film that will be forgotten in a month. Or maybe I’m just really missing something with this one.
What was with all that baseball talk, anyway? Why was that a kind of plot point with Crowe sizing up new prisoners for his baseball team? I know he brings it up again later, but I really thought a big baseball game was going to be a plot point, and it wasn’t.
The rope bridge scene is being hyped by people (and the movie itself since the image of the bridge is being used on some posters), but I just thought it was stupid. Don’t get me wrong, rope bridges are inherently tense, and the idea of walking on a good one makes me nervous (not that I have ever or will ever actually encounter one). But I was expecting a scene of them having to very slowly walk across it with one or two of them falling, but leaving behind their bag of gold that Hawke has to perilously retrieve. Instead, they have to throw each bar one at a time to Hawke in the middle of the bridge who then tosses it to the other side? Could they not have had to the two handler fuckers take a few to lighten the others’ loads and try that first? How did they land on, let’s toss every single bar two times across a bridge? Not to mention, they have been told they will be killed if a single bar is missing. It’s just stupid.
And once again, why the fuck did they have to do this at all? The mine owner trusted two of his goons enough to escort the gold, but he didn’t trust them enough to just drive away with the gold? And why was the gold safe to transport in a car later on? Maybe I just missed something when the owner was going over why it had to be done this way. Did he say something about the roads being watched day and night? If so, then why weren’t those road agents already taking the gold. What were they waiting for?
I can’t stress enough how much Crowe is wasted in this. He just comes across as sad, not menacing. And he truly disappears for the majority of the film. I wanted the guy from the meme screaming about having a bad day. Instead, I got…I don’t know…Body of Lies Crowe?
