Sovereign opens in select theaters and is available on VOD on Friday, July 11.
A superficial thriller chronicling an actual, lethal instance of extremist violence, Sovereign is far more interesting in the abstract than it is as a finished film. It’s an earnest, largely well-acted attempt to tell an urgent, relevant story about a troubling break with reality: the events that led to the 2010 West Memphis, Arkansas shootings perpetrated by self-anointed “sovereign citizens” Jerry and Joseph Kane. Unfortunately, it’s also a slight film that offers no more than a superficial portrait of this father and son, played here by Nick Offerman and Jacob Tremblay. There’s little insight in director Christian Swegal’s well-intentioned, yet incomplete, by-the-numbers exploration of how the Kanes wound up in a standoff with officers of multiple law-enforcement agencies – though Sovereign goes to great lengths to re-create that standoff. When the dust settles, whatever greater truths or revelations were to be found in this telling can’t be heard over the ringing in your ears.
While Swegal’s debut feature begins promisingly with a haunting sequence showing the aftermath of the shootout, it quickly flashes back in time and settles into a consistently rote retelling of how we got to this moment. This is seen through the eyes of the lonely young Joe, who seemingly longs for a normal adolescence while his father ties them each a noose from the tangle of conspiracy theories and misinterpretations of supposed legal loopholes. He’s already under the delusion that he’s saving himself and his boy by simply declaring their immunity to the laws or authority of any government; there’s not a whole lot of suspense in waiting to watch them hang themselves – just run-ins with perplexed cops and sparsely attended seminars where Jerry preaches a false gospel of skipping out on mortgage payments.
People don’t often buy into conspiracies if their life is in a great place, and like any half-cocked explanation of The Way Things Are, there is a kernel of relatable, emotional pain to Jerry’s convictions. But Sovereign ultimately plays the source of that pain like a shocking third-act reveal – just one instance of how it carelessly paints its main character as a tragic, misunderstood figure who just so happened to lash out violently when the fantasy hed built his life around came tumbling down. We seem to be meant to feel bad for Jerry, as he isn’t profiting in any major way from spreading this crackpottery. But this proves too flattering and manipulative to take seriously.
It’s a shame, because Offerman is absolutely riveting in the role. The Parks and Recreation star made me feel every ounce of desperation any time Jerry steps up to give a big speech or goes to pieces when someone calls BS on him. That the character almost feels like the secretly cuddly libertarian Ron Swanson left behind his gentle sitcom world and came crashing into ours with violence on his mind could be jarring, but the anger growing behind Offerman’s eyes is believably unsettling. He gives one of the best performances of his career playing a dad who’s sweatily exploitative, profoundly sad, potentially dangerous, and self-destructive. It’s just that the rest of Sovereign lets him down.
A film like this needn’t be some sort of broadside, but it should at least reflect some deeper curiosity about the climate and the culture that shapes its characters. Otherwise, we’re left with the questions of “Why make this into a movie? And why now?” At times, Sovereign gets close to an answer: Offerman convincingly unraveling as he delivers speech after grim speech that hints at why he or anyone else might buy in to what Jerry’s selling. Attempting to make sense of this movement is a fool’s errand, but that doesn’t excuse Sovereign from merely gesturing toward the facts without ever grappling with them. It does a grave disservice to the characters, the true story, and what it represents about the contemporary United States.
If you’re going to make a film about a specific, uniquely American strain of extremism, you’d think you’d want to say something about it. But save for a flat subplot that attempts to draw parallels between the Kanes and a gruff detective (played by a one-note Dennis Quaid) and his own son, Sovereign has surprisingly little on its mind. When these two storylines predictably collide, it only feels like an unnecessarily forced and oddly trite twist rather than something revealing.
But collision is Sovereign’s top priority. With no substance to tend to, it instead falls back onto staging the bloody culmination of this downward spiral in a more dramatic (and, again, manipulative) fashion. Offerman is devastating in this finale, but it’s all too little, too late. By the time Sovereign loops back to what it showed us in the beginning, plenty of gunfire is exchanged and bodies pile up. But there’s little meaning behind any of it. That emptiness you feel isn’t an illustration of how futile this violence was – it’s just Sovereign’s inability to make any lasting impression. The dangers lingering on the fringe of American society remain something worth reflecting on, but Sovereign won’t be remembered as the film to do it.
