The Order (2024)

***/****
starring Jude Law, Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan, Marc Maron
screenplay by Zach Baylin, based on the book by Kevin Flynn & Gary Gerhardt
directed by Justin Kurzel

by Walter Chaw Justin Kurzel makes films about bad, broken men and the cultures that cultivate them, and he excels at this. His True History of the Kelly Gang is one of the great neo-westerns, while The Snowtown Murders is already a cult classic for true-crime reenactments of small-town atrocities. The only other person working so dedicatedly in this arena is S. Craig Zahler. The difference is that Zahler’s films leave me feeling filthy, disgusted with myself and everyone else. Unlike Kurzel, Zahler doesn’t deal in “based on real events” currency. Rather, his nihilism is founded on more uncomfortable insights into masculinity. Zahler’s films are about you and me; there’s no chance to separate ourselves from his loathsome and violent men. It’s that space in Kurzel’s films, the ability to say, “Sure, that happened once, but it’s over now,” that allows us to look at his subjects as apart from us. Kurzel’s films are gripping for sure, even powerful, professional and superlative technically, but not soul-sickening–not indictments of who we are and what we will allow. While he may pinion the Other with merciless clarity, he’s on the side of the angels. Society is restored in Kurzel’s films, one way or another. Zahler’s, on the other hand, offer us no good guys or a future worth living.

The Zahler version of Kurzel’s latest, The Order, is Dragged Across Concrete, in which two crooked, cash-strapped cops set up an ambush to rob a professional thief. There’s a bank heist during which a teller is murdered, and her death–and the care with which Zahler has established her poignant life prior to it–has stuck with me like a wound that won’t heal. It’s truly awful, the more so because it’s all so pointless: a little bit of money. Oh, how they make her suffer. The Order dramatizes the hunt for the leaders of the rising Aryan Nation in the United States circa the 1980s by bedraggled FBI agent Terry Husk (Jude Law) and local cop Bowen (Tye Sheridan). Their chief obstacle initially is disbelief that white supremacists have organized to the point of knocking over banks and plotting assassinations and other terrorist acts, using The Turner Diaries as a six-step template for initiating a race war. Husk’s bosses find it impossible to conceive of a long game in which homegrown Nazis plan to install confederates at every level of government, the judiciary, and eventually Congress and the Presidency. If The Order is a warning, it comes about 40 years too late.

The Order is set mostly in my home state of Colorado, whose old airport, Stapleton, was named after Benjamin Franklin Stapleton: not only a former five-term Mayor of Denver, but a proud member of the KKK who appointed Klansmen in his police department to ensure his re-election in a recall vote in 1924. Colorado was the centre of KKK activity for a while. We used to have a Chinatown, but they burned it to the ground. Our baseball field sits where it used to be. Spike Lee’s BlackkKlansman is based on true events that happened in Colorado Springs, just south of Denver. It’s nice to see my home state in the movies, is what I’m saying, particularly during one armoured car robbery on a mountain pass that I’m pretty sure is Highway 285 towards Telluride, which I drive once a year.

The version of The Order that was actually a warning is Mark Pellington’s Arlington Road (1999). Twenty-five years ago, it identified homegrown white terrorism as likely this nation’s greatest existential threat. The bad guys don’t look like Pablo Escobar, they look like Tim Robbins. No one is coming across the border to blow up the Federal Center in Oklahoma or lay siege to the nation’s Capital carrying the Confederate Battle Flag–not unless it’s the border that defines the Bible Belt. The Order is hindsight, and as hindsight, it’s detailed and rigorous. With a perfectly flat midwestern accent, Law is incredible as a man who hears the music too late and figures everything out but can’t get anyone to listen to him. He reminds me a lot of Treat Williams in Prince of the City. Of all the movie’s analogues, though, the closest might be Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with Husk playing the role of the provincial doctor who tells everyone, “They’re here already,” until there’s no one left to listen. Horror isn’t that no one believes you, you see, because there’s always the chance they will eventually. Horror is when everyone believes you and it doesn’t matter, because you’re the last human on Earth.

Hoult is exceptional as far-right evangelical leader Bob Mathews and Sheridan, our very own Barry Keoghan, humanizes an exposition dump and obvious martyr. But The Order lacks urgency or, closer to the truth, I lacked the heart to invest in it. I felt this way when I read Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, too: I knew things were bad, really fucking bad, but I didn’t know they were that bad, and I’m not sure I benefit from the wisdom. I was raised to believe that knowledge is power. Learning was considered a premium, a privilege, a sign of class and a means of gaining status and stature in this country of limitless opportunity. I’m not so sure anymore. Terrible people have conspired for generations to gain the control they have now. I know. Our country violates international law and doesn’t hold the powerful accountable for their crimes. I know that, too. And so what? The Order shows how a few people in our nation’s “law enforcement” learned what white nationalists planned to do to this country in the 1980s, and now it’s 2024 and it’s happened. It happened anyway. The Order is a good movie about a failed nation. I remember hearing the news when I was 11 that a local talk-radio host, Alan Berg, had been executed by racists in his driveway–an event dramatized in The Order. My dad explained it all to me. He said the world is full of people who will hate you for your appearance and where you’re from. You keep your head down and be quiet. I don’t know what The Order is teaching, but the world keeps teaching me, over and over, until the words are just noises, my father’s lesson.