Ethan Hawke says The Weight was made the hard way, with him and director Padraic McKinley taking Sam Murphy and a group of fellow gold-smuggling convicts deep into the Bavarian Forest. The forest stands in for 1930s Oregon in the film, which was set for theatrical release on Sept. 18.
That choice matters because Hawke is arguing for a kind of moviemaking that depends on place, not software. He said putting actors in an actual location lets that setting become another character, and he pointed back to earlier work to make the case. Hawke said that when he was 19, he trudged through snowy Alaska for White Fang, and that he later cruised around Los Angeles with Denzel Washington in a 1979 Chevy Monte Carlo for Training Day. He said 50 percent of that film was him and Washington in the car, and that if the same material had been done in front of a green screen, it would have been a lesser version of the movie.
In The Weight, Hawke plays Sam Murphy, a World War I veteran and widowed single father who can barely care for his young daughter during the Great Depression. A misunderstanding involving two corrupt cops lands him in prison, and he is at risk of losing custody before he is released. Russell Crowe plays Warden Clancy, who offers Murphy an under-the-table deal: help steal gold before Franklin D. Roosevelt's executive order requires it to be surrendered, and Clancy will grant him early release.
Hawke said he saw Murphy as an honorable man and linked him to his World War II veteran grandfather and to the Greatest Generation. He said he wanted to play a character shaped by old-fashioned American ethics, including an unwavering belief in the equality of mankind and in pulling together for one another. He added that while antiheroes are easy to tell stories about, he has been missing the kind of plainspoken moral center found in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It's a Wonderful Life.
The film's own setup undercuts the purity of Hawke's pitch, though. The Weight is selling itself on physical realism and a hard, outdoor way of working, yet it still uses the Bavarian Forest to stand in for Oregon rather than shooting in Oregon itself. That does not erase the effect Hawke is chasing, but it does show how far movie realism often goes before it stops short of literal truth.
What remains to be seen is how much of the film's power comes from the place itself and how much comes from the story it is being asked to carry. Hawke has made the argument plainly: the location should feel like part of the cast. On Sept. 18, audiences were set to decide whether the forest does that job.
