Christian Swegal’s “Sovereign” primes the audience to wonder how much a snake oil salesman buys into his own hype, with a serving of muscular and surprisingly disturbing action on the side. Inspired by the 2010 West Memphis police shootings, this movie is sparse and lurid and perched on a higher theme as embodied by two contrasting father figures. It’s ambitious and charged with tension. Missed opportunities abound, but ambition is much more than nothing, especially given our current realm of retreads.
Jerry Kane (Nick Offerman) is a preacher of the sovereign citizen movement, which is a part of a web of underground anti-government groups. If Jerry is pulled over on the highway by police, he will insist that his vehicle is a “conveyance” that isn’t engaged in commerce. That rationale, for reasons that elude me, is meant to excuse Jerry from having a driver’s license or registration. When Jerry is in court for what should be a trivial civil matter, he attempts to stage a citizen’s arrest and take over the trial.
Swegal’s script is most haunting when allowing Jerry to sound temptingly sane. In drab church conference rooms, preaching to the enraged and disenchanted, Jerry insists that money is made up, designed as a mode of government control, with shifting rules. I’m not an anarchist, but yeah, obviously, amirite? Befitting its source of inspiration, “Sovereign” is set in Arkansas in 2010, not long after banks were bailed out by the government despite contributing to the corruption that spurred recession. Who pays the tab? Citizenry that isn’t rich enough to hide money offshore or matter to those in charge. While we’re at it, remind me who that new big and beautiful bill benefits.
Whether you’re right or left, in between or neither, or whatever it is that Jerry thinks he is, my guess is that most of us to varying degrees nurse the suspicion that organized society at large is corrupt and increasingly proud of it. If there is a uniting idea sweeping the nation, it might be that we’re adrift, and this conviction is evident in the downright creepy preoccupation that corporations currently have with selling nostalgia to patrons with endless remakes and cosplay of the ’80s, ’90s and early aughts.
Swegal taps into this bitterness with a directness that’s unusual for American movies, especially those on the mainstream level that are designed to keep us falsely empowered, leaving us hoping that one day we might be the ones who are hot and rich and get to live above the law. The lure of Jerry’s lifestyle is that he is attempting to live above the law without the money, democratizing a proletariat form of lawlessness.
Swegal and Offerman toe a tricky line with Jerry. One would have to be insane to find Jerry’s platform persuasive as articulated here. The hypocrisy is blaring: Jerry rants over the illusions of money while spending it himself; he rails against the illegality of the bank foreclosing on his mortgaged house when he has the house and did mortgage it. Why should he enjoy the privilege of driving on tax-paid roads if he doesn’t bother with rudimentary conformity? His beliefs are half-assed and childish, as Jerry wants the grid without paying for it — like the wealthy, come to think of it. Swegal and Offerman don’t sentimentalize these contradictions, and they don’t make cheap sport of Jerry either. His frustration is palpable and relatable, and Offerman imbues Jerry’s grandstanding with a hard and moving edge. You see why disturbed people might listen to this guy.
Jerry has a son who is on the verge of adulthood, Joe (Jacob Tremblay), and we’re led to assume that we’re seeing a coming-of-age situation in which a child or disciple learns that a figure of reverence is a scoundrel. Bits of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood” and “The Master” are in this movie, as well as pieces of Richmonder Rick Alverson’s “The Mountain,” to name a few. “Sovereign” is not on the level of those films, but it’s similarly thorny, belonging to the tradition of the American movie that’s obsessed by how small-town fabulists embody our grander and more disturbing contradictions as a country.
Jerry and Joe do not have a pat movie relationship, and a cathartic awakening eventually comes from an unexpected place at considerable cost. Swegal is alive to how a selfish and antisocial father can strangle out of his child a sense of possibility. Joe is an accessory to Jerry, though Swegal doesn’t define this relationship solely by that element of exploitation. The constriction can be comfortable until it’s not, until a reckoning is forced by the volatility and narrowness of Jerry’s vision.
Swegal’s script is lean, too much so, and a game of compare and contrast flirts with banality. Alternating with the Jerry and Joe show is a subplot with a decorated police chief, John Bouchart (Dennis Quaid), and his son, Adam (Thomas Mann), who is a police officer as well as a new father. John and Adam may embody the authority that Jerry seeks to subvert, but we notice the similarities: Jerry and John are fathers enthralled with a system so much that it circumvents their capacity to express love, while the children are in line to pay for their fathers’ dueling senses of obsession.
The contrast is schematic, to the point that one may think of the legendarily clunky and dogmatic films of that early aughts flash in the pan, Paul Haggis [“Crash”]. Offerman and Quaid put meat on this script’s bare bones though. Quaid does a lot here with little, using his aging, tough guy aura as shorthand for unspoken love and regret. It’s an elegant performance that complements Offerman’s short fuse. And the film’s austere and convincing imagery, suggesting the filmmakers have actually met people outside of the movie industry, brings to mind the work of another Paul: Schrader.
Nina Conti’s “Sunlight” is another movie about alienated wanderers that hits much harder than I expected. On paper, it sounds like a hipster lark, an exercise in springing inside jokes that are meant to flatter the audience’s smugness. The daring of this picture is that it means its outlandish idea, and you are likely to be moved.
Roy (Shenoah Allen, who wrote the script) is on the verge of hanging himself in an anonymous motel room somewhere out in the dry wild of New Mexico. He comes to in his van, which is being driven by a woman in a monkey suit, Jane (Conti). At first you may wonder if the monkey, in this movie’s world, is meant to be accepted as a real monkey, and is represented surreally by what is very plainly a person in an outfit. It feels like that kinda movie — but no, the suit is actually meant to be a suit.
Playing the monkey, Jane speaks in an amusing accent that sounds a little like a drunken Sean Connery impression. That voice, combined with the strangely appealing face of the monkey suit, works a form of alchemy that establishes “the monkey” as a distinct character. A comedian and ventriloquist, Conti has the skill to encourage you to roll with it, and the pleasure of “Sunlight” springs from giving yourself over to absurdity that turns out to count for more than you expect.
Roy and Jane are united in alienation and quickly attracted to one another, despite Roy not knowing what Jane actually looks like. “Sunlight” becomes a riff on the notion of a woman needing to distance herself from her body, and the sexual attention it attracts from men, in order to regain trust not only in men but, more importantly, herself. The poignancy of this romance is that Roy can handle that — he isn’t afraid of Jane’s damage and eccentricity. He is well versed in damage himself.
Conti and Allen rekindle an element of the romantic comedy that I didn’t think was possible in our money and optics obsessed modern culture: the intoxication of the chaos that comes from giving yourself over to someone no matter what the obstacles appear to be. Sometimes you just have to go with it and the absurdist comedy and erotic heat waves keep the romance from getting soggy. “Sunlight” is also the rare romance that is in touch with how many people fall in love: by busting one another’s balls.
“Sovereign” is in theaters everywhere. “Sunlight” is on Apple+.
