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Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Lawless (2012)



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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