The Weight

A breakout at this year’s Sundance, Padraic McKinley’s grimly determined debut is an indie throwback to the man-versus-wild movies of the ’70s: gritty films like the Robert Redford-starrer Jeremiah Johnson, or The Last Hard Men. Admittedly, The Weight’s impact is lighter than the title suggests, and sticks to formula like a superglued barnacle, but here’s another showcase for the endlessly versatile Ethan Hawke: truly the Swiss Army knife of acting.

We meet his car mechanic Murphy hurtling towards skid row: jobless, homeless, and after a scuffle with cops, sentenced to a labour camp. “When I get out,” he tells his daughter Penny. “I’m gonna come get you.”  That promise is the fuel to Murphy’s dying fire. Four months later, he’s cracking rocks with a chain gang and building a road to nowhere. A tenuous bond with Russell Crowe’s warden leads to an offer he can’t refuse. The government are seizing gold. Black Hawk Mine is next. Lead a crew through 50 miles of wilderness, deliver the bullion at a rendezvous and he’s a free man. Cue a men-on-a-mission movie in Depression-era rags.

The Weight gropes for a consistent tone in its overlong first act, finally finding its pulse in the savage wilds of Oregon. As Murphy’s band of felons grapple with the wilderness (and each other), those looming pines begin to look a lot like prison bars. Episodic perils abound: shoot-outs with vagrants, dodging timber in a downriver log drive and a heart-in-throat crossing over a groaning rope bridge that owes a debt to the infamously hair-raising sequence in William Friedkin’s Sorcerer. McKinley stages the action with stripped-down grit, but there’s a horror director in the making here. Set to a strobing lightning storm, the callous killing of a wounded member is genuinely unnerving.

Eventually, the weight of the title becomes clear. It’s not the gold. It’s the pain each convict is carrying, revealed in walk-and-talk backstories. Sadly, only two characters register: oily snake Rankin (Austin Amelio) and indigenous runaway Anna (Julia Jones, formidable until a needless romance). Crowe is clearly in Dark Mode after playing Goring in Nuremberg. Clancy — a glowering, tobacco-spitting mood tyrant — is another ripe addition to his growing villain gallery, brief though it is. Ignore the top-billing: he’s a bookend to Murphy’s journey.

This is Hawke’s vehicle, and his dogged presence drives the film. Those once boyish features are hardening into a crag of weathered rock. The eyes are as soulful as ever, though, and the role of grizzled hero fits him like a dirty glove. Weirdly, the credits run a smiley you’ve-been-watching cast roll-call to Lynyrd Skynyrd. Great for a cast-and-crew screening, but it pulls you right out of the desolate mood.