Burden                 3 stars

I Missed Burden at Sundance 2018 as it was a hard ticket to get and was an award winner at the festival. Then somehow it wasn’t released to theaters until 2020. Burden is a true story about a poor white man, Mike Burden (Garrett Hedlund), raised on the hatred toward blacks so prevalent in the South. Mike serves the KKK in the small town of Laurens, South Carolina and works as a repo man for a small rent to own company. In both roles he works for Tom Griffin (Tom Wilkinson) who is the Grand Dragon of the local KKK chapter and to whom he regards as a father. Griffin, who preaches white supremacy and violence, has acquired the local dilapidated movie theater in town and turned it into his dream, a museum to the KKK called The Redneck Museum, where the exploits of the Klan such as lynching and cross burnings are glorified. The town has a substantial black population so the museum soon catches the attention of Rev. David Kennedy (Forest Whitaker) who leads protests against the racist museum but in a peaceful manner, in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr.  Kennedy still honors his uncle who was lynched by the Klan decades earlier. Then we follow the challenges that Mike faces when he starts seeing Judy (Andrea Riseborough from 2018’s Nancy and 2020’s gorefest, Possessor), a dirt poor single mother who does not approve of Mike’s involvement with the KKK. The movie gives us a picture of the hatred and violence that blacks continue to receive, but this has been done so often in movies before. (See Blackkklansman) The movie is set in the 1990’s so what I don’t see is a representation of the much more subtle forms of racism that are common today. Think of Charlottesville, 2017 and the treatment blacks get from some white police officers. The acting is very good. Hedlund was made for this kind of role, a head strong uneducated white southerner redneck (see also On the Road and Mudbound). I thought the movie didn’t give us enough reason to believe his transformation that led to him leaving the Klan. Though the movie is based on a true story, it has a predictable feel to it. Burden is worth seeing but I wouldn’t call it an award winner.