When gold is involved, people are liable to act funny. Devoted and doting single parent Samuel Murphy (Ethan Hawke) is doing his absolute best to make a living in 1933, also known as the height of the Great Depression. Coming home from church with his daughter, Penny (Avy Berry), they see they’ve been evicted. Thinking they’ve found a new apartment, what Murphy and his daughter actually find is despair, as one event leads to another, culminating in Murphy being arrested and forced to work for the state. He’s indefinitely separated from Penny.

Under the watchful eye of Warden Clancy (Russell Crowe), Murphy’s smarts and poise stick out significantly compared to the other convicts. It is he who gets selected by Clancy to lead a team of convicts in a dangerous excursion across the Oregon wilderness. In it, he and his chosen individuals are to transport a bevy of gold bricks safely from one facility to another in a week’s time, supervised by the warden’s selected handlers. In exchange, Murphy and the other convicts will get their release, and for Murphy, his daughter back. But it doesn’t take long for loyalties to be tested, or for outside groups to intercept the fortune, or the terrain itself to be perilous.

With the massive critical and commercial success of Sinners, as well as the critical love for Train Dreams, I suspect that over the next few years, we’ll get more period dramas, whether horror-based and/or infused with romance, set in the 1930s. Or, they might follow in the footsteps of The Weight. Simply based on who’s in the movie and where it takes place, it’s impossible for the movie to have a low floor.

Making his film directing debut is Padraic McKinley. The Weight was not shot on location in Oregon, but the Bavarian Forest of Germany serves as a strong stand-in for the Pacific Northwest. The scenery is stellar and the cinematography naturalistic, whether the group is around a campfire, sludging through the muddied terrain, contending with a hellacious thunderstorm, tossing gold bricks from point A to point B (my favorite scene of the feature), or traversing chilly waters. Outside of the environments, the costumes and set designs are richly rendered to transport viewers into the early 30’s.

As Samuel Murphy, Hawke unsurprisingly shows us again that he has the skills to play any modality and make any character feel robust. Here, he balances a rugged brawn with real-world intelligence, tied together by a quiet yet relentless desire to get his daughter back. Hawke is nearly in every frame as the sun to which this film orbits around. However, in very limited screen time, Crowe’s husky and coarse demeanor fits extremely well into this setting, and the collective time he has with Hawke is special, mano a mano stuff.

Two review quotes flash in The Weight’s trailer. One is “A tense story of life-and-death survival,” and the other is “A nearly biblical tale of good and evil.” For better and worse, these are apt descriptions. The screenwriting trio of Matthew Booi, Matthew Chapman, and Shelby Gaines set up the stakes solidly enough, and midway through, provide some, albeit very quick, minor backstory of how the others joining Murphy on this trek came to be imprisoned.

But to use a baseball metaphor (fitting for this movie because the warden loves baseball), The Weight never gets off of second base, using its crisp, heist-like premise to build intrigue but peaking in excitement about two-thirds of the way through. The inability to do so makes the film too predictable, and more closer to plodding than purposeful in a handful of stretches. What we learn about Murphy by the end of it is no different than what he was introduced as: sharp, resourceful, honest, and determined.

There’s much to admire about The Weight. It’s scenic, and has locked-in performances from Hawke and a sparsely-used Crowe. But its characters outside of the bigger names are largely forgettable, and the survival thriller aspects are sometimes devoid of the tension the movie positions with the premise. All in all, it’s a good movie, but it never ascends to that extra level I was weighting for it to get to.

B-

Photo credits to go impawards.com, and are courtesy of Vertical.