Josh Brolin’s the recruiter/rules “explainer” in this version of the Stephen King novel.
There’s William H. Macy and Wright’s boy Michael Cera and lots and lots of gonzo Edgar Wright touches.
Powell? He’s about as uninhibited as we’re likely to ever seen him, I tell you what.
Nov. 7, let the hunt begin.
Smart, tense and thought provoking, “Sovereign” is a movie of its moment — thirty years of American moments.
An “inspired by true events” thriller built around a stunning performance by Nick Offerman, it offers insights into Red State America and the cult appeal of of fringe conservatism to rural white America that most every other movie on these subjects misses.
Offerman plays a one-time roofer, beaten down by loss and hardened by struggle against powerful institutions aligned against him, who figures he can resist, stonewall and outsmart banks, the courts and the police through twisted populist faith and a myopic misreading of the law.
Jerry Kane is an Arkansas widower who is home-schooling his teen son Joe (Jacob Tremblay of “Room” and “Wonder”) when he’s at home, blithely ignoring the eviction notices and bills piled on their cluttered kitchen table every time he returns from one of his “seminars” road trips.
Jerry acts the part of a white-suited folk hero, popping up on podcasts, fighting banks and “The System” with a quixotic mix of stubbornness, parsing and twisting the law into his idea of “literal” and when all else fails, flinging “faith” into the argument to end it, at least in the eyes of the gullible.
“You say I owe you something? PROVE it,” he preaches.
Jerry’s a classic “stupid person’s idea of what a smart person sounds like.”
The people who listen to him on podcasts and who show up at American Legion halls for his lectures/pep-talks and coaching through foreclosure fights and the like are desperate. Underinformed folks whom life has turned into losers will do anything to flip that script — and that includes rage-blinded trips to the polls and to gun shops.
Jerry has thoroughly indoctrinated his son, from re-interpreting his Red State’s home school workbooks to arranging the boy’s nightly prayers to God, his dead mother and cribdeath baby sister and “J.C. (Jesus). Never forget J.C.”
A big payday means it’s time for the boy’s first semi-automatic weapon and a trip to the range where the targets have a uniformed cop shape.
“Aim more for the head. You know they wear bullet proof vests.”
On the other side of that thin blue line is Dennis Quaid, the aged “chief” of the local law enforcement, grooming his own son (former child actor Thomas Mann) to join the force, watching and reinforcing the rough-handling “overwhelming force” training of much of American policing today. No, you’re not interested in listening to someone’s “point of view.” Your job is ensuring “compliance” with violence and that “overwhelming force.”
The chief’s son is trying to absorb all this, and applying the old man’s tough love to his newborn baby. Comforting crying infants is how you start down the road to “spoiling” a child, Chief insists to Chief Jr.
But young Joe starts to push back at the home schooling so that he can enroll in high school and maybe have a conversation with the cute neighbor (Kezia DaCosta) he crushes on. And officer-to-be-Adam might be inclined to listen to his wife (Ruby Wolf) rather than the old man’s old school parenting when it comes a screaming infant.
Maybe the next generation can change the fate their fathers seem ordained to play out.
First-time feature writer-director Christian Swegal — he wrote Taraji P. Henson’s “Proud Mary” — takes us into “Blue Caprice” country with this tale of a dangerous father, a groomed son and the rising dread about what’s coming. A guy who so enrages a judge that the man summarily rules against him and storms out of court and who infuriates a succession of police who pull him over and don’t accept his “travel” documents, his definition of “conveyance” as it’s used for commercial or non commercial purposes, isn’t a ticking time bomb. He’s a fuse waiting to be lit.
“Is driving a right or a privilege?“
The genuis in casting Offerman is his acting baggage. His no-nonsense “man’s man” Ron Swanson on TV’s “Parks and Rec” and humorous self-reliance memoir “Paddle Your Own Canoe” has a lot of right wing folks making a meme out of him, assuming “he’s one of us.” Yet there he was, best man at a gay wedding on “Parks,” playing a Trumpish tyrant who causes a “Civil War” rather than giving up office, and here he is skewering the whole Sovereign Citizen Movement/Militia Movement and assorted other favorites of the fascist fringe in a single movie.
Offerman makes Jerry Kane seem, at first, somewhat reasonable. When your enemies are the banks and the “fascists” many folks see in the badge-wearing classes, you’re going to get sympathy from several demographics.
Jerry joking about violence against judges, local bureaucrats and the like at his seminars has people shouting “turn off” the video “camera,” lest their shared belief that violence is the best way to get what they want get around. “He’s only joking,” Jerry’s fan and paramour (Martha Plimpton) insists.
We and everybody else know better. Many gun fetishists cling to an Old West “pull the trigger, problem solved” ethos that explains why all the “political” and racial violence in America comes from that end of the spectrum.
Writer-director Swegal doesn’t quite pull off the parallel fathers story structure he was going for, and Quaid’s “chief” seems to be a sheriff, and in either guise would not be the person to interrogate a kid about his not-yet-violent crackpot father to determine if the boy’s in need of social services aid.
But Offerman’s Jerry Kane is a villain for the ages, a man with a point of view that more people share than we’d like to believe. He makes “Sovereign” must-see cinema for understanding not just a “type,” but a movement and a moment, and just where they’re taking us if we let them.
Rating: R, violence, profanity
Cast: Nick Offerman, Jacob Tremblay, Dennis Quaid, Nancy Travis, Thomas Mann and Martha Plimpton.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Christian Swegal. A Briarcliff release.
Running time 1:41
Far fetched, funny-ish sci-fi about a “Hail Mary” to attempt to save humanity from a…virus infecting stars?
Cutesy and calamitous.
March 20 of 2026?
The promotions for this reboot have been all over the place — sentimental and cutesy, hard nosed and heroic, a do gooder swimming against the tide of self interest and the self serving simpering of America today.
The casting looks solid if not overwhelming.
I’m sold enough to be interested. You?
Argentine filmmaker Luis Ortega gave us “Lulu,” “El Angel” and “Damn Summer.”
This looks sexy, silly and sinister.
Music Box Films has this upcoming release, starring Úrsula Corberó and in the title role,
Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, and it looks like a winner.
Oscar winner Jim Broadbent earns a fine showcase in “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry,” a sweet story of grief, regret, obligations and the kindness of strangers.
It’s based on a novel by Rachel Joyce that seems inspired by any number of similar “pilgrimage” narratives — “The Straight Story” to “The Way,” with a cloying detour into “Forrest Gump.” The sentiment plays. The quixotic quest at its heart — an elderly man’s impulsive walk from South Devonshire to Berwick-upon-Tweed to visit a dying woman — is dogged, scenic, patient and engaging.
That predictable turn towards “Harold goes viral” doesn’t quite spoil it. But it comes close.
Broadbent’s the title character, a set-in-his-ways OAP with a comfortable but joyless life with his brittle wife Maureen (Penelope Wilton of “Downton Abbey”) in a tidy, underdecorated semi-detached in a tidy town (South Brent, Devon).
Something broke between these two, and the ties that bind survived that. But a letter from a woman he used to work with, Queenie, has Harold taking stock. She’s dying in a hospice in the northernmost town in England, Berwick-upon-Tweed. Harold struggles with a reply letter, even enlists Maureen’s help.
“Say something you mean,” she testily advises, put on edge by the entire idea of her husband reconnecting with this woman, Queenie. As an aside, she adds that some things can’t be put in a mere letter. She comes to regret that.
But he writes that letter and walks to a mailbox, then the post office, and finally a convenience store. The blue-haired young woman (Nina Singh) there gives him more advice — another sign — on hearing of this letter to a woman dying of cancer.
“Believe you are making a difference.”
Harold resolves to go see Queenie, and on an impulse he calls Saint Benedict Hospice.
“Tell her Harold Fry is on his way. I’ll keep walking as long as she keeps living.“
He mutters the suggestion that he “let her down.” And that she’s not the only one. Flashbacks give a glimpse of a son (Earl Cave) who needed something else from Harold.
There’s nothing for it but for this elderly man in street clothes, rain jacket and not-suitable-for-a-long-hike deck shoes to walk the 500 miles, “the length of England,” to fulfill his promise.
He’s left his phone at home, which his wife figures is a sign he’s got dementia. He has no map. But south to north he goes, trekking on footpaths and B-roads and along major highways, stopping in tiny inns, flopping in barns, searching his soul for the guilt he hopes to resolve and depending on the kindness of strangers all along the way.
“You will not die, you will not die” is his walking cadence as he marches days and then weeks, pausing in Exeter Cathedral, stopping at farms, pubs and the like, “keeping to a budget” but helped by others, who take pity and rediscover their own empathy.
Maureen is instantly beside herself, then furious and whatever comes after that.
“The Unlikely Pilgrimage” is about Harold’s physical feat and a spiritual journey he and his increasingly distant wife unintentionally undertake together. And it’s about how others respond to Harold, from the helpful folks who offer him lifts which he refuses, to the immigrant doctor (Monika Gossman) who isn’t allowed to practice medicine in Brexittania, to people inspired by his quest and wanting a piece of it for their own inner peace.
Veteran Brit TV director Hettie MacDonald, with Joyce adapting her own novel into a screenplay, leans into the cute and never lets a tug at the heartstrings pass unnoticed on this journey of not just miles, but months. It works more often than not, even if its Gump-like “movement” interlude doesn’t.
But Broadbent and Wilton are the ones who do the heavy lifting here, and never for a second do they let us doubt we’re in good hands. He gives us the simple faith of acting on an impulse that Harold must do “something,” and she conveys all the hurt, confusion and panic that implies.
They’re simply great as a couple in the winter of life, struggling with the past and one last test of their relationship, people who are as likely to get the “meaning” of all this pilgrimage wrong as they are unlikely to get it right.
Cast: Jim Broadbent, Penelope Wilton, Earl Cave, Nina Singh,
Daniel Frogson and Naomi Wirthner.
Credits: Directed by Hettie MacDonald, scripted by Rachel Joyce, based on her novel. A Quiver release on Amazon Prime.
Running time: 1:48
I was working in Tennessee near the end of the Ernest P. Worrell fad and got to interview this serious actor turned famous bumkin goofball.
He’d come into town to help talk actors into joining acting unions, make appearances plugging his movies, surfing the wave that made him rock star famous. Or infamous.
If he wasn’t wearing the hat or vest or know-it-all knucklehead smirk, nobody’d recognize him
I once interviewed him in the lobby of Atlanta high rise hotel and saw that to be fact.
Died too young, but a whole generation grew up on his foolishness. Good to see him being remembered in a documentary.
Éanna Hardwicke (Vivarium (2019) stars as Roy Keane, who had a very public bust up with his World Cup manager Mick McCarthy, something the Irish weren’t quick to forgive.
Kind of the anti “Ted Lasso?”
Tabitha and Porshia Zimiga star in this newly-widowed, hardnosed horse trainer who provides shelter to wayward teens and her daughter, fighting to ride, to save the dream and save the ranch from guys like Scoot McNairy, who has the perfect name for an actor playing that Goggins-lite character.
Sony Classics just picked this up during its festival run. “Coming soon.”
James and Dafoe are joined by Joe Keery and Rachel Sennott in this Italian job build around a Plain Jane played by Rebecca Antonaci.
Saverio Costanzo wrote and directed this love letter to the movies and what they used to mean to Italy in the Age of Fellini, Rosselini and De Sica.
A whiff of “A Royal Night Out,” a taste of “My Week with Marilyn” and a heaping helping of “La Dolce Vita” are what the premise and this preview promise.
The title’s been around for a while but it makes its way to the USA July 18.
Movie Nation 