Most Tom Hardy characters speak only in grumbles, but he's able to say more in his incoherence than most actors achieve when they’re playing to the back row. As much
as people may poke fun at Hardy’s voice in The
Dark Knight Rises, Bane may be one of the more comprehensible characters
he’s ever played. In other movies like Warrior
and his latest film Lawless, Hardy
says very little indeed, and when he does talk it’s not the most eloquent (or audible) of
dialogue. Yet he commands the screen in every scene he’s in, and ultimately
he’s a big reason why Lawless works
at all. It’s a film that goes through the prohibition-era gangster beats in
ultra-violent and predictable fashion, but Hardy gives all the bloodshed a
human face that it otherwise lacks.
Hardy is Forrest
Bondurant, a moonshiner in Franklin, Virginia who is one of those gentle beasts
that you so often see in the movies. He may seem like a teddy bear at
points—particularly around women—but there are few people who will clock a guy
in the mouth quicker. He is both the most caring and most brutal man in the film.
His brothers are Jack (Shia LaBeouf) and Howard (Jason Clarke), the former of
which narrates the film. Howard is more talkative than Forrest, but also
unafraid to beat someone to a pulp. Jack, however, is the puppy of the
Bondurant clan. He may talk a lot, but he has a deathly fear of actually
pulling the trigger.
The three
Bondurant brothers are doing just fine in the moonshining business, but when a
particularly nasty Chicago cop named Charlie Rakes (Guy Pearce) starts to
demand a cut, the bloodshed begins. Something of a mini-war develops between
the Bondurants and Rakes, and it winds up pulling innocents like Jessica
Chastain, Mia Wasikowska, and Dane DeHaan (the messed-up kid from Chronicle) into the fray. Gary Oldman
also pops in as a moonshine kingpin from the nearby town.
Lawless is an incredibly violent film—sometimes shockingly so—and
that relative boldness at least sets it apart from its gangster brethren. Director John Hillcoat
is mostly unflinching in his depiction of the bloodshed at play here; never
glamorizing it with slow motion or other Zack Snyder-esque tricks. Hillcoat
much prefers the Scorsese method of having the violence be in your face, quick
and brutal. In this universe death is not a noble or romantic thing. When you
die, you just die. And often badly.
There are far
fewer positives regarding the film’s story, which is only able to surprise the
audience once or twice throughout its two-hour running time. Once all the chess
pieces are introduced at the outset, it doesn’t exactly take a film scholar to
predict how it’s all going to wind up by the end. Even when it does have a
shocker in its back pocket, it’s usually a disappointing one. Much of Lawless is bleak, but whenever it
chooses to back off and be even slightly optimistic it’s kind of a letdown. Screenwriter
Nick Cave and Hillcoat have created an interesting universe, but their refusal
to shake anything up to a significant degree turns a potentially unique movie
into an utterly plain one. It’s well-made and well-acted, but plain
nonetheless.
Hardy’s
performance is easily the best in the film, but it’s also the most substantive
character by far. Otherwise, the performers aren’t really asked to do anything
out of their comfort zone. Despite being a problematic person, I still stand
behind LaBeouf as an actor that has yet to find the role that will prove it to
the world. He’s quite good here, but once again he is not covering any ground
we haven’t seen him cover before. Now that he’s officially leapt off the Michael Bay
train I’m interested to see the places he’ll go, though I’m not sure his plan
of starring in explicit Lars von Trier films is going to solve all his
troubles.
As is so often
the case with movies like this, the best moments in Lawless have virtually nothing to do with the cops vs. bootleggers
plot that unfortunately must drive the whole thing forward. At its best, the
film simply embeds us in the middle of this strange, unsettling time and
observes these characters as they live out their twisted lives. The story is
more a nuisance than anything, and it’s something we’ve already seen a trillion
times before. With Lawless, Hillcoat
tells a wholly familiar tale in an unfamiliar land. It may sting in the moment,
but all wounds will heal within minutes of exiting the theater.
Grade: B-
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