A FAMILY DIVIDED
Dark political comedy pits brother against brother
Just in time for U.S. Thanksgiving (and the U.S. midterm elections) comes The Oath, a jet-black political comedy from first-time feature writer-director Ike Barinholtz. It’s Black Mirror meets Black Friday.
The premise — about as farfetched as a Space Force — is that U.S. citizens have been asked to sign a loyalty waiver, promising to be true to both the nation and the president. Officially, there are no repercussions if they don’t sign the Patriot’s Oath, but there are tax breaks for those who do.
Chris and Kai (Barinholtz, Tiffany Haddish) play a liberal couple who shake their heads at this news and tell each other they’ll never sign. But as the Thanksgiving deadline approaches, protests and counter-protests grow, and a new offshoot of Homeland Security starts arresting troublemakers. You know things are bad when Seth Rogen gets pinched.
Barinholtz structures his film like one of those family-gathering-gone-wrong comedies. Dad (Chris Ellis) can’t operate the TV; Mom (Nora Dunn) bores everyone with updates on forgotten acquaintances; and brother Pat (Jon Barinholtz) has a hatful of right-wing opinions that drive Chris crazy. Also, Chris keeps forgetting the name of Pat’s new girlfriend (Meredith Hagner).
It’s clear from the set-up that we can expect a food fight at the very least, but things take a darker turn at the movie’s halfway point when government agents (John Cho, playing it cool, and Billy Magnussen, definitely not) show up at the door. They say they just want to talk. Chris gets his back up. And as Cho’s character later puts it, “There were mistakes on both sides.”
The Oath is very much a movie of the moment; described as a dystopian future, it’s really more of a dystopian present. American tribalism is on display in the way the two brothers read about the same news event through different filters on their phones; Chris sees innocent civilians being shot, while Pat says they were breaking the law and threatening the peace.
Similarly, you can engage with this film on a purely political level or enjoy it for the dramatic tension and pacing. Barinholtz (Ike, though his brother is good, too) truly commits to the role of the angry, hothead liberal; he seems almost pleased at the notion that there will be riots over the holidays, because it proves that things are bad enough to warrant such extreme behaviour.
But when the situation in his living room demands a similar level of commitment, he balks, then flails. At one point he considers moving the family to stay with Kai’s parents in Texas, and to go further south if necessary. “I speak a little bit of Spanish. I will learn more!”
But it is in the role of writerdirector that he adds the most to the film, balancing the quirkier aspects of his characters and their predicament with the notion that something very like this could come to pass. Stranger things are happening.