Dir: John Hillcoat
Plot: Three moonshining brothers in 1920s Virginia find their activities disturbed by the arrival of a ruthless lawman determined to wipe them out.
Lawless isn't a very good name for a movie, is it? A bit generic.
A better name for this would be The Beverly Killbillies. Excuse the corny
wordplay, because it serves a higher purpose. Not only does it sum up the plot
of the Nick Cave-penned bootlegging drama, it also sums up its fundamental flaw
- it isn't sure whether it's a bloodsoaked thriller or a good ol' boy yuk-fest
and it never tries probing deep enough to find out.
But let's come to that in a second. The plot revolves around a real-life Virginia moonshining clan, the Bondurant brothers - gruff leader of the pack Forrest (Tom Hardy), drunken, brawling Howard (Jason Clarke) and doe-eyed tenderfoot Jack (Shia 'Beefy' LaBoeuf) and their gentle cripple neighbour Cricket Pate (Dane DeHaan). The boys operate under the blessing of the corrupt county sheriff, until the arrival of a ruthless federal agent (Guy Pearce) unleashes an explosive war between the bootleggers and the law in which neither side is afraid to go to bloody extremes to assert their dominance.
The first thing to note is that the filmmakers have got the look
of the film just right. The painstakingly-evoked world of cloudy moonshine
jars, dirty woollens, weathered wood and dusty roads transports the viewer back
to Prohibition-era rural Virginia, and a strong cast ensures that the
period feeling does not (as often happens) fall flat once the actors open their
mouths. Hardy's star is very much on the ascendant these days, and his work
here will certainly not jeopardise that - his Forrest is a very watchable
mixture of growling menace, black humour and old-fashioned fist swinging
brutality. And whilst I'm not generally crazy about LaBoeuf, he puts in an
extremely engaging performance and his romance with an Anabaptist girl (the
increasingly-visible and always-welcome Mia Wasikowska) is surprisingly
effective. Clarke and DeHaan's characters are less prominent but make
themselves memorable nonetheless - in particular DeHaan, whose affecting
performance gives the film its only real emotional punch. Neither Jessica
Chastain (as a love interest with a capital-p Past) nor Gary Oldman get the
screentime or material their talents deserve, but it is Guy Pearce who gets
lumbered with the real short straw as federal agent Charlie Rakes. Pearce is a
terrific actor, but unfortunately here he's playing one of my absolute least
favourite stock characters - the cardboard antagonist. The kind of character
who responds to the simple question "Who are you?" with the line
"I'm the one who's gonna make your life real difficult from now on if you
don't toe the line, country boy." Ugh. Seriously? Is that a thing people
say? Is that a thing you can even imagine people saying?
And now for the flaw: put simply, Nick Cave is not yet a great
screenwriter. I haven't seen his other major effort, The Proposition, but it
got decent reviews so I'll just assume that his weaknesses as a narrator weren't
as apparent there, but here they are unmissable. The major problem is that
the tone is all over the place - Hardy and LaBoeuf's storylines never quite gel
and it feels as though the two stories are vying for attention. The problem
would be less glaring if the film didn't trundle between Jack and Cricket's
goofy redneck adventures and Hardy punching someone's throat out of their
mouth, between a drunken Jack chucking up in church and a rape scene.
Increasingly, one suspects that Cave is letting things like pacing, tone and
narrative logic play second fiddle to his fascination with the time and place
he is describing. In the end it starts to feel like he's trying to fill in
an American pop culture bingo card as written by foreigners - Prohibition agents!
Moonshine stills! Amish! Juke joints! Vintage Pepsi adverts! Tommy guns!
Furthermore, the attempt to recreate the kind of surreal, violent
poetry that is so wonderful in Cave's musical output falls flat at times
precisely because there is no strong narrative sense behind it. Read the
lyrics to his marvellous song Papa Won't Leave You, Henry and imagine that 'list of images' format
applied to a movie and you'll catch my drift. For instance, when we first
meet Gary Oldman as big-city bootlegger Floyd Banner he is stepping calmly out
of a car after having emptied a Tommy gun into an unspecified nemesis in the
middle of a street in the Bondurants' tiny hometown, in broad daylight.
Undaunted, he shares a long, narrow-eyed stare with an understandably terrified
Jack before calmly making his leisurely getaway. Who in the world would ever do
that? No-one. It's simply a cool way to introduce the character - who cares that his
behaviour is inexplicable? The icing on the cake is that we don't see him again
for an hour: that is weak plotting.
What's more, about half of the film's runtime falls into this
category - the film is bloated with 'colour' scenes, the kind that an
experienced screenwriter knows how to synthesise with narrative momentum.
Instead we are bombarded with picturesque but purposeless sequences
(The car breaks down. They fix it. They almost get killed by Banner. They
don't.), as though Cave had written down every arresting image which occurred
to him in the middle of the night and then filmed them all and hung a plot
around it. I don't enjoy putting Cave's work down - he's one of my favourite
singer-songwriters - and the script is still notable for the flavourful
dialogue he gives its characters; but the lack of craft and structure evident
in the storytelling betray a screenwriter still finding his feet. Lawless is a
bracingly violent, consistently engaging film; well acted and wonderfully
evocative of time and place - and yet the weak narrative underpinning the
stylish action make it an unsatisfying concoction, and one you'll be unlikely
to seek out twice.
6/10
6/10
Your reviews are as interesting as the bottom of my garbage pail.
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