Politics has long been a no-go zone around the Thanksgiving dinner table, the subject sure to stoke furies in otherwise copacetic people. But the current times are even more divisive than most, more heated, more likely to make someone throw a glob of gravy in his brother-in-law's face. When the center has vanished, the extremes clash over cranberry sauce.
Ike Barinholtz saw these circumstances as ripe terrain for dark comedy. Then he added an ingredient: a loyalty oath that the president has strongly suggested every American should sign.
Barinholtz, best known for his roles on The Mindy Project and in Blockers, has long been fascinated by the McCarthy era and the Red Scare that tore lives and families apart and made dissent a bad word. He felt a similar vibe in the wake of the 2016 election.
Put it all together and you've got The Oath, a scabrous, violent, uneven but ultimately pertinent farce about being home for the holidays in unusual times. It's a movie you can take your liberal sister or Trumpian brother to and maybe, just maybe, share a good laugh.
"Despite the fact that terrible things are happening in the world, truly devastating and sad things, there is also an absurdity to it all," Barinholtz says over breakfast recently in Dallas, ahead of the film's opening on Friday. "And when things are so crazy and absurd, you do have to try to laugh at it."
Barinholtz is not a fence-sitter: He is firmly anti-Trump and sees a loyalty oath as a logical (and dangerous) thematic extension of these times. He notes that Trump's mentor was Roy Cohn, Sen. Joe McCarthy's attack-at-all-times right-hand man. "What a great role model," Barinholtz says. "The worst American of all time."
But he also knows that satire doesn't work if only one side is unhinged. That means Chris, the liberal Thanksgiving dinner host played by Barinholtz, is among the most ridiculous characters in the movie. As his wife (Tiffany Haddish) tries to keep a cool head, Chris, jumpy and disheveled, takes every bait offered by his conservative brother (Jon Barinholtz, Ike's real-like brother) and sister-in-law (Meredith Hagner), who likes to tweet at the losers and the haters.
The loyalty oath has sent Chris into a neurotic frenzy.
"A really bad version of this movie is the one where Chris is the hero," Barinholtz says. "He's the most liberal character. He's also the most insufferable. He's paranoid. He's ruining the holiday. We're not taking both sides, but we are showing specifically the crazy behavior on both sides."
A loyalty oath is one kind of authoritarianism; enforcing it is another. The Oath takes a bloody turn when Chris' gathering gets a visit from two government agents (Billy Magnussen, blood-thirsty; and John Cho, chill) who have heard someone on the premises has been, well, disloyal. Blows are exchanged. Shots are fired.
Thanksgiving is pretty much ruined for everyone.
The Oath probably won't change anyone's mind about anything. Instead, it finds comedy in our current state of intractability. There are battle lines being drawn. And guess who's coming for dinner?
