Ike Barinholtz’s directorial debut, The Oath, is an Orwellian dystopia, but with a twist. Imagine Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World meeting Bridesmaids.
Tiffany Haddish, of Girls Trip, co-stars in The Oath as Kai, who is married to lefty academic Chris. Chris is played by Barinholtz himself, who you may recognize from MADtv and movies including Blockers and Neighbors. Set in the near future, an increasingly repressive regime in Washington seeks to force all residents to sign a “patriotic” oath, pledging allegiance to a Trump-like government by Black Friday—or else.
Chris doggedly sticks to his leftwing principles, refusing to put his John Hancock on the loyalty oath, even as others around him buckle under pressure. Government forces stage mass arrests and even shootings of anti-oath demonstrators, while agents of the Gestapo-like “Citizens Protection Unit” (who make ICE agents look soft) round up refuseniks.
Meanwhile, Chris and his family gather to celebrate the annual Thanksgiving holiday, hosted by Chris and Kai. To keep the peace, everyone has taken a pledge of their own: To not discuss politics during dinner.
Chris’s parents, Eleanor (SNL alum Nora Dunn) and Hank (Chris Ellis, Armageddon), plus his brother Pat (Superstore’s Jon Barinholtz, who is actually Ike’s brother offscreen) and his girlfriend Abbie (Meredith Hagner of Woody Allen’s Irrational Man) are centrist to conservative characters who clash with Chris’s holier-than-thou leftist beliefs. Only Chris’s pot smoking sister Alice (Carrie Brownstein, the cannily cast female lead from IFC’s parody series Portlandia) shares his convictions—or at least appears to.
Despite the family pledge, things start to get out of hand when Chris gets word at the dinner table via cell phone of a brutal massacre of anti-oath protesters by pro-government forces. But the shit really hits the fan when two Citizens Protection Unit agents (including John Cho of the Harold & Kumar stoner flicks) show up unannounced to interrogate Chris about his anti-oath views. Chaos ensues.
Will Chris’s righty relatives stand by him? Will Chris resort to violence? Will the authoritarian government prevail?
Barinholtz’s genius is to tell his dystopian story with a fast paced, laugh-a-minute panache featuring hysterically funny dialogue, and mixing satire with slapstick. In a clever career move, Tiffany Haddish, who also executive produced The Oath, proves she can transcend broad comedy such as Girls Trip and Night School and hold her own in more thoughtful satirical material — even as she continues to tear up the screen and provide some sexy sparks that underscore Chris and Kai’s loving relationship.
My one quibble with The Oath is that Chris and Kai’s interracial marriage is never an issue. Even Pat’s girlfriend Abbie, who is somewhere on the ideological scale between Sean Hannity and Alex Jones, never says a word about miscegenation.
Barinholtz’s 93-minute low-budget indie manages to turn the spectre of Trump’s so-called Great America into a laughing matter. Just as Michael Moore does in his documentaries, Barinholtz makes politics entertaining. At the end of his new film, Fahrenheit 11/9, the prophetic Moore warns that the Trump regime may deploy a bogus “emergency” similar to the Reichstag fire in 1933, which the Nazis exploited to consolidate Hitler’s rule. Shortly after the documentary’s release, the Trump Administration ominously deployed a supposedly unblockable alert system on Americans’ cell phones.
How to resist creeping authoritarianism? Trying to stay true to progressive ideals no matter what while laughing in the face of adversity, Ike Barinholtz’s non-macho Chris offers an unlikely hero for our times.
The Oath was screened at a gala last month at the LA Film Festival and opened Oct. 12 in select theaters.
Ed Rampell is a film historian and critic based in Los Angeles. Rampell is the author of Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States and he co-authored The Hawaii Movie and Television Book, now in its third edition. This originally appeared at Progressive.org.
From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2018
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