Any talk about Sovereign probably begins and ends with Nick Offerman, who is unlike I’ve ever seen him before and is very good, but who, like the movie, also never quite elevates into being great.
As we open, teenager Joseph is alone in his house when he receives a notice that he and his father are to be evicted for not paying the mortgage. His father, Jerry, played by Offerman, comes home and immediately insists to Joseph that nothing will happen, because he has not received any such notice, and besides, he hasn’t entered into any contract that gives a bank the right to take their house. This is plainly not the case, but Jerry has certainly convinced himself, if no one else. He’s the sort of person who’s constantly talking about the minutiae of contract law, but what he’s actually saying amounts to semantic games and barely constructed conspiracy theories. No, officer, I’m not driving a car, I’m simply traveling in a conveyance as a private citizen, engaging in no commerce.
The story centers on Joseph, played with a stoic intensity by Jacob Tremblay, and we see how much damage a father can do to his son, and especially as we know from the beginning this will all end in tragedy. But Joseph never quite feels like a coherent character, and there’s a parallel subplot with Dennis Quaid as a police chief whose own son has also gone into law enforcement, and this part of the story seems both superfluous and underwritten. Which is to say, if they’d cut it, it would have made the entire movie leaner and tighter, or if they’d explored it more, they could have underlined the destructive father-son dynamic in a stronger way.
Offerman is magnetic as Jerry, but we do often get the feeling that there’s some nuance missing, some gesture he’s not making, some extra complexity he’s not giving us. Still, there’s plenty here to impress us, even if Sovereign never finds that next level.
Sovereign is on VOD July 11th.
