If you think your holiday get togethers are bad with Donald Trump as president, take a look at The Oath, in which one family’s petty bickering and political disputes gives way to a violent hostage situation. This political satire takes place in a reality—one that doesn’t feel very far removed from our own—where the White House has invited citizens to sign a kind of loyalty pledge to the sitting president. Dubbed the “Patriot’s Oath,” it’s purely optional, of course, but then there’s the looming deadline on Black Friday, and the promise that anyone who doesn’t sign the Oath opens themselves up to possible investigation by the CPU—the Citizen’s Protection Unit, an offshoot of Homeland Security—in order to ensure that dissenters aren’t giving more cooperative countrymen any trouble.
The film is laid out like an overlong comedy sketch and often feels more than a little repetitive, but it gets a lot of mileage out of being utterly plausible. It isn’t difficult to envision something like this happening today, nor is it hard to quibble with the indignant reaction of Chris (Ike Barinholtz), a progressive family man who bristles, to say the very least, at the thought of signing the Oath, although he can be so annoyingly vocal about his positions that he’s sure to leave some viewers wondering, “Wait, am I as bad as this guy?” The president causing Chris so much stress goes unnamed, but Chris nevertheless bares all the traits of someone suffering from Trump Obsessive Disorder: In the year since the Oath was announced, he’s grown a scraggly beard, gained weight and appears utterly incapable of removing himself from the never-ending cycle of Twitter, political podcasts and cable news. It’s a dystopian idea to think that we might not be able to escape from “content culture,” and The Oath provides a subtle but pointed look into a life completely consumed by the nonstop noise of news.
Lucky for him, Chris’ level headed wife, Kai (Tiffany Haddish), keeps him in check, and is there to assure him that the upcoming Thanksgiving weekend with his family won’t be as bad as he’s expecting. Barinholtz, in his feature debut, also wrote and directed the film, and his depiction of the gathering is cleverly drawn, utilizing familiar stereotypes to play up the broad comedy. You have the passive-aggressive commentary from Chris’s right-wing brother, Pat (played by Barinholtz’s brother in real life, Jon) and his girlfriend Abbie (Meredith Hagner), who spends her time trolling people on Facebook; the apolitical display by his parents (Chris Elliott and Nora Dunn), whose rule of “no politics at the dinner table” is just a way to avoid being challenged for their conservative beliefs; and the well-meaning but unhelpful peacekeeping from his liberal but less adversarial older sister, Alice (Carrie Brownstein), who, much to Chris’ chagrin, admits to having signed the Oath out of pure resignation.
Central to these dynamics is Chris’ wild inability to let even the littlest thing go, and Barinholtz’s writing and performance makes for fresh, persuasive satire. Chris’ beliefs—that the Oath is unconstitutional; that the government being able to punish people for not signing it is fascistic—are more than reasonable. But Barinholtz taps into a specific yet increasingly familiar personality type: the appropriately angry liberal who fails to properly direct or contextualize his exasperated feelings toward the cruelty and injustice of American society. Chris can’t help but start unwinnable arguments, and he’s more likely to talk himself into a corner than persuade anybody to change their minds, but the film also never suggests he should concede the opposite viewpoint as much as he should find a more proactive way to process his indignation. It makes sense that Barinholtz wrote this character for himself; he seems to know him intimately. There’s probably a lot of Chris in Barinholtz, and vice versa, making his performance an act of self-examination.
One of The Oath’s biggest themes is how stark political divide can alter the dynamics of the nuclear family, which Barinholtz and his co-stars exemplify in a series of extended squabbles that are alternately humorous, cringeworthy and just plain absurd. The back-and-forth character interplay works in chunks, but it’s also depicted the same way each time, creating a feeling of repetition that makes sense thematically: The film suggests that we will condemn ourselves to having the same basic arguments over and over again until we finally resolve to change something about either ourselves or our circumstances. But it comes off as dull and monotonous onscreen, the film clocking in at 93 minutes but sometimes feeling much longer. Things pick up at about the halfway point when a couple of CPU agents (John Cho and Game Night’s Billy Magnussen) show up on Chris’s doorstep, asking about a disturbance. Here, The Oath transitions into a full-blown thriller that strives to maintain a comedic spirit, creating a tonal mishmash that works in spurts but never quite settles into a sweet spot.
The film feels true to life but is ultimately only fleetingly satisfying. Barinholtz struggles in his attempts to wrap up the increasingly elaborate narrative he’s concocted, and the whole thing culminates with a deus ex machina so convenient that it has to be a joke. Yet the shaky landing still somehow feels apropos. Nobody knows the extent to which the current administration will change the landscape of American life, and to its credit, The Oath doesn’t offer up any possible outcomes or solutions. Instead, it envisions a place where people learn to hold on to what they have, fight for what they love and, perhaps most importantly, save room for mom’s famous pumpkin cheesecake.
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