Producers: Bryan Haas, Stuart Ford, Justin Kurzel and Jude Law Director: Justin Kurzel   Screenplay: Zach Baylin   Cast: Jude Law, Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan, Jurnee Smollett, Alison Oliver, Odessa Young, Sebastian Pigott, George Tchortov, Victor Slezak, Morgan Holmstrom, Ryan Chandoul Wesley, Huxley Fisher, Philip Forest Lewitski, Philip Granger, Daniel Doheny, Geena Meszaros and Mark Maron   Distributor: Vertical

Grade: B

An early, almost forgotten, episode in America’s modern white supremacist history is dramatized effectively by Australian director Justin Kurzel, who dealt with mayhem in his native country in films like “The Snowtown Murders,” “The True History of the Kelly Gang” and “Nitram” but stumbled with his two international Michael Fassbender starrers, “Macbeth” and “Assassin’s Creed.” 

Working from a script by Zach Baylin based on the 1989 non-fiction book “The Silent Brotherhood: Inside America’s Racist Underground” by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, Kurzel tells the story of Robert Jay, or Bob, Mathews, the neo-Nazi activist who created the titular group, also called The Order, to pull off robberies of banks and armored cars in order to finance the sort of revolution and race war depicted in William Luther Pierce’s infamous 1978 novel “The Turner Diaries.”

It’s framed in the form of a cat-and-mouse story, in which Mathews’ plot is uncovered, and Mathews himself hunted down, by FBI agent Terry Husk, a man haunted by his previous undercover work.  (Husk is a fictionalized version of Wayne Manis, an agent who played a major role in Mathews’ downfall, which culminated in his death in a 1984 shootout with federal agents at the rural Washington home that caught fire during the stand-off.)

The transformation of Husk into a troubled character is a typical Hollywood-style gloss on the historical record, and there are other alterations made in the script for dramatic effect as well.  But overall, the film is more faithful to the actual events than most pictures of this sort.

Chain-smoking Husk (Jude Law) arrives in a deserted Washington state field office world-weary and without his family.  He looks into a spate of bombings and robberies that the sheriff (Philip Granger) hasn’t investigated very seriously, but gung-ho deputy Jamie Bowen (Tye Sheridan) thinks might be the work of a right-wing militant group associated with the Aryan Nation, a white-supremacist religious outfit headed by Richard Butler (Victor Slezak). 

Husk is doubtful, but a visit to Butler’s compound and to Bonnie Sue West (Geena Meszaros) persuades him otherwise.  Her husband Walter (Daniel Doheny), an old friend of Bowen’s who’d been spouting radical ideas rather freely to the likes of liberal radio talk-show host Alan Berg (Marc Maron) has disappeared, and Husk and Bowen find his body buried in the forest, a victim (we see in an early scene) of his comrades in The Order, which has splintered off from Butler’s church because of what its leader Mathews (Nicholas Hoult) considers an overly passive approach.

There follows a complicated pursuit of Mathews and his motley crew of confederates by Husk and Bowen, who are joined by Joanne Carney (Jurnee Smollett), a colleague of Husk’s, and, eventually, plenty of other agents, especially after Mathews’ followers assassinate Berg, bits of whose broadcasts have punctuated the film from the start.  In the process we’re introduced to Bowen’s devoted wife (Morgan Holmstrom) and son (Ryan Chandoul Wesley), and that domestic bond naturally presages his fate in a shoot-out that erupts when the lawmen attempt to foil one of the gang’s robberies—another typical Hollywood invention, but excitingly staged by Kurzel, cinematographer Adam Arkapaw and editor Nick Fenton.  Fleeting allusion is also made to Mathews’ domestic life, which involves both a wife (Alison Oliver) and a lover (Odessa Young), as well as a young son (Huxley Fisher) whom his father intends to follow in his footsteps.  And there’s a tense sequence when Husk and Mathews briefly meet as the FBI man goes hunting and Mathews considers taking him out.

For the most part, “The Order” brings this early event in the recent history of white supremacism in America to vivid life, thanks to Kurzel’s intense direction and compelling performances down the line.  Despite the tendency to tweak the narrative to meet audience expectations, in terms of accuracy it’s leagues ahead of Costa-Gavras’ 1988 “Betrayal,” which altered the facts to such an extent as to make its connection to the record beyond tenuous (the picture was mediocre in purely dramatic terms as well).

Though Husk may be a character colored by Hollywood convention, Law invests him with gruff passion, and Sheridan nicely etches the arc of a young man who embraces darker impulses as he rushes to engage against dangerous forces.  The real revelation, though, is Hoult, who has usually played more benign figures but here captures the malignancy Mathews hides beneath an ordinary exterior.  There are moments—like a speech at Butler’s church—where he could be more charismatic, but in general he’s a genuinely menacing presence.

Without exaggerating, production designer Karen Murphy and costumer Rachel Dainer-Best evoke the atmosphere of rural Washington and Idaho in the mid-eighties, which they and Arkapaw make no attempt to prettify, even if the vistas are often magnificent.  (The film was actually shot in Canada.)  Jed Kurzel’s score is suitably downbeat, though it pulses up during the action scenes.

Though “The Order” is about events in the eighties, it obviously carries contemporary relevance, given the realities of today’s political climate. The film doesn’t neglect to note that, but mostly it’s content to let the fact that the past is prologue to the present resonate on its own.

Producers: Denzel Washington and Todd Black    Director: Malcolm Washington   Screenplay: Virgil Williams and Malcolm Washington   Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, John David Washington, Ray Fisher, Danielle Deadwyler, Corey Hawkins, Michael Potts, Erykah Badu, Skylar Aleece Smith, Jerrika Hinton. Gail Bean, Melanie Jeffcoat, Stephan James, Malik J. Ali, Jay Peterson and Matrell Smith   Distributor: Netflix

Grade: B

The third installment in Denzel Washington’s project to film all ten of August Wilson’s Century Plays about the black experience in twentieth-century America (following 2016’s “Fences” and 2020’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” both superb) is of his 1987 Pulitzer Prize winner “The Piano Lesson.”  While actually the fifth of the ten in terms of writing, it’s the fourth in terms of its chronological setting, 1930s Pittsburg, and specifically the house of Doaker Charles (Samuel L. Jackson), where his widowed niece Berniece Charles (Danielle Deadwyler) and her daughter Maretha (Skylar Aleece Smith) also live. 

In the living room sits the titular piano, the instrument that once belonged to the Sutters, the Mississippi family to whom the Charles family were slaves.  It bears elaborate depictions of the Charles family, carved on to it by a Charles ancestor at the insistence of the Sutter who bought it to please his wife, who missed the slaves whose sale financed the purchase.  Berniece’s father had stolen the piano and was murdered by the Sutters in retaliation for the theft, and for her it is a priceless family heirloom that she refuses to part with, even when asked by her suitor Avery Brown (Corey Hawkins), who’d hoped to use the proceeds from its sale to finance his church.

Now Berniece’s brother Boy Willie (John David Washington) arrives from Mississippi with his pal Lymon (Ray Fisher), bringing a load of watermelons they intend to sell.  But his real purpose is to take the piano and sell it in order to purchase what’s left of the Sutter estate, leaving behind his sharecropper status and becoming a landowner. 

The struggle between him and Berniece over the future of the piano is reminiscent of the one between Lena Younger and her son Walter Lee about how to use the insurance money they’ve gotten from the death policy of Lena’s husband in another classic tale of black life in America, Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 drama “A Raisin in the Sun.”  In each case, the debate involves reverence for the past on the one hand and what kind of future a legacy should be used to fashion on the other.  But while the long, heavy shadow of slavery is integral to both, it’s more explicit here.  There’s an additional personal element to the brother-sister animosity in that Berniece blames Boy Willie for causing the death of her husband Crawley.

Onstage, of course, the action of the piece is confined to a single setting, the living room of the Charles house, and the past is recounted by the characters.  Director Malcolm Washington and his co-writer Virgil Williams have, in the customary fashion, tried to “open it up” for the screen, with gauzy flashbacks visualizing the history that Wilson presented in pungent dialogue. 

In this case, unfortunately, that blunts the drama rather than intensifying it.  A prologue, for instance, shows Boy Charles (Stephan James), Berniece and Willie Boy’s father, removing the piano as James Sutter (Jay Peterson) is busy watching Fourth of July fireworks back in 1911, and being killed—an event only later described by Doaker in the play, in one of Wilson’s most powerful monologues.  Showing the action up front reduces the later words to repetition; similarly, the flashback actually showing the first Boy Willie (Malik J. Ali) actually carving the figures on the piano as Doaker recalls him doing so similarly detracts from the strength of the language.  In such instances, and others, simply focusing on Wilson’s words would have been the better choice.

Another dubious decision mars the final scene, an exorcism in which Avery attempts to expel the ghost of Sutter, who has invaded the house, and Boy Willie battles the apparition.  It’s a fraught sequence, but handled with theatrical economy onstage.  Malcolm Washington, cinematographer Michael Gioulakis and editor Leslie Jones turn it into something much more bloated, with flashes of lightning in a dark sky and a bruising scuffle between Boy Willie and the specter that becomes much too literal, especially given the extreme close-ups in it.

The use of such close-ups throughout, in fact, is detrimental, though one can appreciate the desire to use camera movement to lessen the feel of staginess.  The close-ups, however, are especially troublesome in the case of John David Washington, who played Boy Willie in the latest Broadway revival and hasn’t sufficiently tempered the over-the-top approach that works on the boards in the transfer to the screen.  Jackson, who appeared with him in New York as Doaker (and was the original Boy Willie back in 1987), is more subdued and therefore much more effective, as is Deadwyler, who isn’t reluctant to let loose in Berniece’s angry outbursts, but keeps the emotion within bounds.  Fine turns from Hawkins, Fisher and Michael Potts, as Doaker’s brother Wining Boy, add to the strong ensemble; the business between Fisher and Potts about Lymon’s purchase of city duds is an especially engaging digression, and all three have moments of dialogue that allow them to shine.  David J. Bomba’s production design and Francine Jamison-Tanchuck’s costumes are first-rate, as is Alexandre Desplat’s somber score, though there are intrusive needle drops.           

Despite quibbles, this is a very good version of Wilson’s masterful play, well worth seeing.  It does not, however, entirely displace the excellent 1995 telefilm, in which Charles S. Dutton made a compelling Boy Willie (which he’d also played on Broadway) and Alfre Woodard a fine Berniece.