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Ethan Hawke is having a moment, the way fellow Newton boy Matthew McConaughey did a few years back. Onscreen since age 14 — yet taken for granted far too long — the undeniable talent behind those chiseled cheeks and snaggled teeth has been more visible than ever of late, finally earning Academy recognition for “Blue Moon,” in which he took the biggest stretch of his career: playing short, balding Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart. “The Weight,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival but feels like it could have been made in the 1970s, features a role that fits more neatly within Hawke’s wheelhouse … but that doesn’t mean you’ve seen him like this before.
An old-fashioned, off-the-grid adventure story set during the Great Depression — a “Wages of Fear”-like wilderness trek, as John Huston or John Boorman might have told it, involving the transport of four packs of heavy gold bars — “The Weight” boasts not only Hawke (who’s clearly the main attraction) but also Russell Crowe. Making his feature debut, director Padraic McKinley had worked with both actors as an EP on TV miniseries (“The Good Lord Bird” and “The Loudest Voice,” respectively), talking them into participating in a modernized “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”-style tale.
In Hawke’s case, Murphy could well be the most physical role he’s ever accepted. With his neat suit and greased hair, Murphy (who’ll be battered and bloody by the film’s finale) looks about as presentable as a mechanic possibly could. It’s not clear whether that’s his job — in 1933, a man would be lucky to have any job — or just his unique skill, as he improvises work with his dear girl Penny (Avy Berry) in tow, looking more than a little like the father-daughter grifter duo in “Paper Moon.” Murphy can study any problem and see a way through it, whether by engineering or simple human psychology.
Looking for a place to live, fortune throws him a doozy of a predicament. A skirmish with three thugs (who turn out to be law enforcement officers) gets Murphy arrested and sent away to a labor camp for almost a year. If he can’t find his way to freedom, Penny will be placed in foster care. Escape isn’t an option, though a conniving warden named Clancy (Crowe) offers a path to early release: President Roosevelt has ordered all the country’s mines to close and the gold turned over to the federal government, but before that happen, Clancy aims to make an entire stockpile disappear.
If Murphy will agree to help him steal about half a ton or gold bars and move them five days through densely forested Oregon terrain, Clancy will sign his papers. He can take three men along to help transfer the load — he picks prison poker buddies Akers (Peter Lewys Preston), Rankin (Austin Amelio) and Singh (Avi Nash) — and will be accompanied by Clancy’s trusted gun Taggert (Alec Newman) and a great big ox of a brute named Letender (George Burgess). Again, escape isn’t an option, though accepting the task comes with considerable risk. Lose an ounce, and their lives are forfeit. Make it to the end, and chances are they’ll be murdered.
While the pieces for a white-knuckle mission seem to be in place, “The Weight” has an uneven, lurching quality, where slogging through the picturesque-yet-endless expanse of tall trees (arboraceous Bavaria doubling for Oregon) is punctuated by bursts of excitement. Unconventional composers Latham and Shelby Gaines’ terrific, mood-setting score does a lot of the heavy lifting, so to speak, as the movie skips between set-pieces. In the film’s most unnerving sequence — wherein the crew must find a way to cross a rickety rope bridge, knowing it can’t take the weight of more than one man and one gold brick at a time — McKinley didn’t have an actual bridge to work with.
By this point, we’ve seen Murphy work miracles, using a tire jack and ingenuity to move a boulder out of the road. So why would he choose such a ridiculous solution, whereby he stands in the unstable middle and asks the others to toss him all 50 or so bricks one by one by one. It’s a foolish strategy — the film’s answer to the hardboiled-egg-eating contest in “Cool Hand Luke” — but one that McKinley isn’t equipped to shoot properly.
For that section of the film to work, a skeptical character needs to push back on Murphy’s plan, calling him crazy or questioning his judgment, so we collectively lean forward and watch with mounting satisfaction (and suspense) as his fingers jam and energy wanes every time a brick is thrown to him. The moment Murphy loses his footing and nearly plunges to his death, one brick away from his goal, audiences should be on the edge of their seats, primed to applaud when the deed is done.
Heck, the whole film should feel like that. But apart from Murphy, the other characters aren’t nearly as three-dimensional — not even Anna (Julia Jones), a Native woman who joins the outfit for no logical reason beyond the clear fact that it makes the chemistry more interesting. Screenwriters Matthew Booi and Shelby Gaines weave subtle humor — and more overt racial politics — into the way the surly group engage with one another.
Early on, darker-skinned, Communist-minded Singh upsets the racist Rankin when he explains how the system threw him in with a whites-only prison detail. Later, Anna shares a powerful story about how she resisted harsh attempts to assimilate. Such details give “The Weight” a certain allegorical heft: All four of the prisoners, as well as Anna, are victims of an unjust system, thanklessly doing the heavy lifting for corrupt power-holders. Murphy doesn’t quite fit the mold, but in Hawke’s hands, he’s the most vivid character of all — crushed, clobbered and nearly drowned.
In the past, Hawke often played characters who were shy, scruffy and slightly unsure of themselves, but here he’s the film’s proactive problem solver — a classical hero more than capable of carrying the film.
English (US) ·