The Weight review: Ethan Hawke anchors a tense Depression-era gold heist

Ethan Hawke leads a tense, earthy thriller in "The Weight," a film whose backdrop is the gold seizure ordered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1933. The executive order banned hoarding and required Americans to hand excess gold to a Federal Reserve Bank by that May. The policy is not dwelled upon, but it sets the stage for an off-the-books smuggling job that a group of work-camp prisoners is assembled to carry out.

Hawke plays Samuel Murphy, a single father raising a young daughter, Penny (Avy Berry), four years into the Great Depression. Murphy is smart, capable and honest, traits that do not serve him well in greedy and violent times. After church one day, father and daughter find they have been evicted. While searching for a new place, they are harassed by toughs; Murphy punches one, and self-defense carries little weight when the man is a police officer. He is sent to a work camp, and if he does not get out in time, Penny becomes a ward of the state.

Raspy-voiced and world-weary, Murphy keeps to himself at the camp, but his resourcefulness draws the attention of the warden, Clancy (Russell Crowe). Clancy is no cartoon sadist and can even seem likable, yet he holds all the power, and it is hard to know whether he can be trusted. When Clancy promises to sign papers freeing Murphy if the gold job succeeds, Murphy takes the bet.

He assembles a team of fellow prisoners — Singh (Avi Nash), Olson (Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen) and Rankin (Austin Amelio) — to move heavy gold bars from one point to another through wet Oregon wilderness standing in for Bavaria. Suspicious, ornery men working for the operation's planners join the trek, along with a Native American woman, Anna (Julia Jones). The large group must stay under the radar on a white-knuckle journey that includes crossing a broken rope bridge with the gold, a sequence built on a stressful tossing-and-catching scheme, and fording a river to cover their tracks. Trust is scarce, and a giggling lone vagrant hunting for food and wondering what is in the heavy bags adds a wild-card threat.

Hawke looks at home in denim workwear, believable as a man whose brain gets him out of more scrapes than his brawn. "The Weight" comes from director Padraic McKinley and writers Matthew Chapman, Matthew Booi and Shelby Gaines, who keep the momentum at a confident clip. It is very much a dad movie, and not in a limiting way — a solid, hearty, meat-and-potatoes picture of the sort Clint Eastwood might once have made.

A Vertical release in theaters Friday, "The Weight" is rated R for language and some violence and bloody images. Running time: 115 minutes. Three stars out of four.