Jude Law battles neo-Nazis in real-life thriller ‘The Order’ – DNyuz

Modern-day domestic terrorism may have peaked with the January 6, 2021, insurrection, in which members of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other white nationalist groups attempted to support Donald Trump in his efforts to defeat the presidential election, but its roots run much deeper.

The OrderJason Kurzel’s nail-biting, true-to-life drama chronicles one of the earliest clashes in the battle between law enforcement and hate groups intent on sowing civil unrest, focusing on an early-’80s organization intent on inciting race warfare. Featuring a standout performance from Jude Law as an FBI agent determined to prevent a tragic massacre, it’s a history lesson that makes up for its lack of breakneck tension with ominous topicality.

Like Kurzel’s previous true-crime film from 2021 Nitrames, The Order—premiering August 31 at the Venice Film Festival and then appearing at the Toronto International Film Festival — is a story about disaffected young white men traversing empty landscapes stained with hate and violence that fester and spread in the dusty sunlight. What’s more, it’s about children whose caustic hearts and minds are unpredictable to strangers and unfathomable to parents, so that when Law’s Terry Husk visits the home of a suspected neo-Nazi, the young man’s father laments, “You think you have control over who they’re going to be, but the truth is you don’t. You try to protect them — that’s the best you can do. But you can’t live their lives for them.”

Working from a script by Zach Baylin (based on the 1989 nonfiction book by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt The Silent Brotherhood), Kurzel once again dives into a world of anger and madness, which is scary precisely because it is so secret.

Husk rolls into Coeur D’Alene, Idaho in 1983 to staff an FBI office that the local sheriff has told him hasn’t been operational for years. A quiet, boring outpost is ostensibly what Husk craves, in part because, as an early phone call home reveals, it’s a last chance for him to reconnect with his estranged wife and daughters, who haven’t yet moved away with him.

Later conversations hint that Husk had previously worked undercover for the New York Mafia and the KKK, and the wear and tear of those assignments is visible in his bleary eyes, downcast mouth, and slumped shoulders. With a mustache fringed with stubble that seems to embody his character’s exhausted state, Law exudes weariness. Yet he’s not merely exhausted; he’s deeply angry and forlorn. In a sublimely interior performance, the actor evokes the cause-and-effect relationship between Husk’s rage and misery, as well as his unquenchable desire to fulfill his law-and-order mission—even at the expense of those he holds dear.

Although The Order doesn’t overemphasize this point, the same can be said for Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult), a white supremacist whose gang commits a series of audacious crimes, starting with a bank robbery that nets them nearly $50,000. Husk only learns of this incident and Mathews’ other bombings and robberies after he asks the sheriff about the white-power flyers around town and gets some information from Officer Jamie Bowen (Tye Sheridan).

According to Bowen, the flyers aren’t the only thing the fanatics are making; they’re also printing counterfeit notes. This sparks an investigation that initially points the duo in the direction of the man who told Jamie about this fake money scheme, who The Order has already depicted himself being executed by Mathews’ henchmen.

Hoult’s villain is a true believer who has split from his mentor. He and his followers quickly become more brutal and deadly, as evidenced by their June 18, 1984 execution of Jewish radio DJ Alan Berg (Marc Maron), a gruesome killing spree that ultimately lands perpetrators David Lane (Phillip Forest Lewitski) and Bruce Pierce (Sebastian Pigott) hundreds of years behind bars.

Kurzel adeptly captures Mathews’ ethos, ruthlessness, and complicated relationships with his wife Debbie (Alison Oliver) and pregnant mistress Zillah (Odessa Young). However, as with some of the quests undertaken by Husk and Bowen (who are aided by Jurnee Smollett’s FBI agent Joanne Carney), it sometimes feels as if important connective tissue is missing from his story. The Order isn’t confusing, but it can be more than a little vague, including with regard to the robberies and shootouts, which are frustratingly perfunctory. Despite the director’s evocative imagery—including a handful of propulsive shots of the corners of car bumpers—the material is rarely suspenseful.

Fortunately, it’s often touchingly bleak, especially as Husk and Bowen begin to put the pieces of this puzzle into place, most of which involve The Turner Diariesthe infamous 1978 neo-Nazi novel that—like many who followed in its footsteps, including Timothy McVeigh—serves as Mathews’ blueprint for tearing down contemporary American civilization and establishing a new white nationalist world order.

This despicable book and its corrosive influence are of crucial importance to The Order‘s story and atmosphere, and sets up the events as not just a terrifying saga in and of themselves, but as a harbinger of the larger domestic calamities yet to come. While Hoult’s Mathews is a generic (if despicable) far-right man committed to preserving a rural, traditional, white way of life, The Turner Diaries proves that the film has a real villain.

As Husk and Bowen follow Mathews through the Pacific Northwest, The Order becomes narratively diffuse, so that a belated tragedy becomes a relative afterthought. By attempting to remain faithful to the historical record while adding a few writerly flourishes, such as comparing Husk and Mathews as kindred spirits, Baylin’s script splits the difference, and in doing so, it undercuts everything. Yet as an introduction to a formative phase of the white nationalist movement in the United States, and as an illuminating look at the means by which hateful rhetoric (spoken and written) inevitably leads to brutal action, Kurzel’s latest book is at once illuminating and chilling.

Moreover, thanks to Law, it exudes both a burning desire to draw attention to this plague – and do something about it – and a depressing fear that the rot may have already become so bad and deep that nothing short of amputation will cure it.

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