Producer: Nick Moceri Director: Christian Swegal Screenplay: Christian Swegal Cast: Nick Offerman, Jacob Tremblay, Thomas Mann, Nancy Travis, Jade Fernandez, Chris Greene, Martha Plimpton and Dennis Quaid Distributor: Briarcliff Entertainment
Grade: B
On May 20, 2010, Jerry Kane and his teen son Joe shot two police officers to death during a traffic stop in West Memphis, Arkansas. From this incident writer-director Christian Swegal has fashioned a father-and-son tale told, although rather lopsidedly, from the perspectives of both killers and victims, stretching and compressing the facts for dramatic effect and adding a good deal of invention and speculation into something aiming to be a modern Shakespearean tragedy.
The resultant film, titled “Sovereign” after Jerry Kane’s adherence to the Sovereign Citizens movement, describes itself upfront as being “inspired by” the real events rather than trying to depict them in semi-documentary fashion. But its use of actual names (or ones slightly altered) is somewhat troubling. Still, though the result has the quality of a schematized telefilm, on its own terms it’s a well-acted, and undeniably powerful, reflection on the unhappy influence overzealous fathers often have on their children.
Though intended to provide a sort of split-screen account of two families—one in law enforcement and the other outside the law—the script spends far more time on the latter, portraying widower Jerry Kane (played as ferociously volatile by an extraordinarily intense Nick Offerman) and sixteen-year old Joe (Jacob Tremblay, who brilliantly conveys the thin, haunted boy’s quiet wariness and fear) as living on the edge of disaster. As the film opens, they’re about to be evicted from their cluttered house (the yard is a mess); Joe’s served with the legal papers while alone, his father off on one of his road trips leading none-too-successful seminars about avoiding foreclosure in the troubled days following the financial collapse of 2008.
When Jerry returns he scoffs at the threat of foreclosure, beginning the process of replying with paperwork declaring himself a sovereign person free of all statutes and contracts to which he has not assented. He then enlists Joe to accompany him on his seminar trek. Both don immaculate white suits to advise audiences of angry, desperate fee-paying attendees how to employ methods based on the sovereign citizen credo to resist the banks’ takeover of their property. Jerry’s presentations are, of course, reflective of his own situation and beliefs; and the seminars barely break even given the travel expense (in one case, Jerry ruefully says, no one showed up).
The travel also poses danger, because true to his system, Jerry has no driver’s license. That leads to his being stopped and briefly incarcerated; Joe is questioned by Chief John Bouchard (Dennis Quaid) and his social services aide Brenda Reese (Jade Fernandez) and placed, during Jerry’s absence, in a juvenile facility where, for the first time, he socializes in classes and recess activities with other kids his own age—until then he’d been home-schooled (something Jerry took an interest in, though with his peculiar slant both political and religious) and yearning for outside contact (he’s taken an interest in a next-door neighbor his own age, following her on social media). The experience sparks his interest in applying to go to public school.
That’s quashed, however, when Jerry’s released, more radical than ever. He’s already bought an automatic weapon and trained Joe in its use; and although he now has a serious girlfriend in Lesley Anne (Martha Plimpton), with whom he clicked when she came to one of his seminars, his behavior is growing increasingly erratic. When he appears in court to rebut the foreclosure proceedings, his furious declaration of his sovereign citizen beliefs infuriates the judge, who orders him removed—a result he claims as a victory, though the eviction proceeds and he and Joe wind up sleeping in their van. By this time he’s a volcano ready to explode, and soon he will. And Joe, torn but still under his thumb, will erupt along with him; he’s the one who actually shoots the two cops
Swegal portrays the Kane family’s unraveling in sometimes excruciating detail—at one point Jerry literally threatens Joe with a gun for what he calls the boy’s “mendacity” in opening their door to law enforcement, but at another he poignantly recalls the death of his infant daughter and his inability to prevent an autopsy he considers a violation of his parental rights, both scenes presented with aching emotion by Offerman. But the film periodically switches to the other side, depicting the relationship between Chief Bouchard and his son Brandon (Thomas Mann), a patrolman whose training in dealing with obstreperous civilians he oversees carefully, and whose quickness in picking up his crying newborn he criticizes as misguidedly softhearted.
The intention is to set up a comparison pointing up both similarities and differences. The Bouchards are obviously as much believers in the law as the Kanes are not, but in each case the father’s rigor is oppressive, though far more so with the Kanes. Brandon is one of the officers killed by Joe, and Robert is among the pursuers who track the Kanes to the parking lot of a big-box store and kill them in a frenzied shoot-out. But the treatment of the Bouchards is relatively perfunctory, and the details are heavily massaged—the actual names of the father and son depicted here were Robert and Adam Paudert, the younger was a veteran with three children, and Robert didn’t participate in the final confrontation. It hardly seems likely that after his son’s funeral Robert made a point, contrary to his earlier advice, of picking up his son’s crying infant and walking with him in his arms into the yard in a reflective mood.
Other problems for the historically minded involve geography and chronology. The Kanes were from Ohio, and were travelling to Florida when the tragedy occurred; though the film never explicitly indicates where the action occurs, the suggestion, given the presumably invented episode of Jerry’s earlier arrest and Joe’s stay in detention (an episode apparently inspired by Jerry’s arrest in New Mexico a month before the killings), is that they were locals. And much of the material about Jerry’s legal troubles seems to be occurred years before in Ohio.
But if you’re willing to accept Swegal’s combination of reportage and imagination, and his inclination to construct his plot with an eye to a conclusion that’s dramatically effective even if it diverges from the record, “Sovereign” is an effective psychological thriller bolstered by mesmerizing performances from Offerman and Tremblay, and adequate ones by Quaid and Mann. The locations around Fayetteville are appropriately grubby, as is Emma Rose Mead’s production design of the Kane home, and Dustin Lane’s cinematography captures it all unfussily, while James McAlister’s score leaves much to silence.
Despite its contrivances, Swegal’s film is a brutally realistic portrait of a family led to destruction by a radical ideology, and while difficult to watch, it’s worth the discomfort.