Never underestimate the power of love – and the overwhelming kindness of an informal preacher – to lead a man to salvation. At least, that’s the message of “Burden,” the third recent film (after “Best of Enemies” and “Skin” from last year a few months later) starring a Klan member who is coaxed into the light.
This time the flawed hero of the film is the real Mike Burden (Garrett Hedlund), an uneducated pensioner in a small town in South Carolina. The year is 1996, and Mike and his hateful brothers redirected a ruined cinema under the name of Redneck Shop and K.K.K. Museum, with Confederate flag. Outside, the Reverend David Kennedy (an affecting Forest Whitaker) and his flock organize peaceful protests against the opening of this abomination. They do not know that Mike will soon mount a roof and train his sniper rifle on the Reverend’s head.
Based on the truly surprising story of Mike’s renunciation of the Klan (and the resulting battle for museum property), Andrew Heckler’s first film is often preachy and overripe with the symbolism of white power. However, his airless fanaticism is quite effective, depicting the Klan’s influence with the authorities and the police as a stain rooted in the fabric of the city. When Mike falls in love with Judy (Andrea Riseborough, all hair and gum), a lean single mother who is not racist at all, he is forced to choose between his wife and the only family he ever has known.
Although the themes of “Burden” seem uncomfortably current, their execution is leaded and dismaying without art. Wrapped in the dusty and soft cinematography of Jeremy Rouse, Mike’s reluctant journey to redemption is not convincing, his personality is only semi-formed and his behavior a tangle of contradictions. The scenes with his surrogate father and the leader of the Klan (Tom Wilkinson, nonchalantly monstrous) have a naturalness that is lacking in his interactions with the preacher, whose almost holy generosity seems almost sacrificial.
And then there is the strangely strange performance of Hedlund, who pushes his character from the inarticulate to the precipice of the slow mind. Bursting feet and head swaying back and forth in a self-soothing bow, Burden approaches almost any situation with such obvious discomfort that he is like a dog once flogged, twice shy. He is a man who only seems fully alive when his fists connect with the flesh, a brute whose baptism scene looks like a triumph, but whose absolution feels very far away.
Burden
Classified R for flying fists and dirty tongues. Duration: 1 hour 57 minutes.