There’s
a heavy element of male posturing about Lawless,
director John Hillcoat and musician-screenwriter Nick Cave’s tale of
bootlegging brothers in Depression-era Virginia. Everybody growls their
dialogue from deep down in their throat or out of the side of their mouth –
which, after Bane in The Dark Knight
Rises, gives rise to Tom Hardy’s secondmost unintelligible performance of
2012 – and Hillcoat allows his actors one or two defining props or tics per
person. Playing the Bondurant clan’s eldest Forrest, Hardy sports a stylish
cardigan-and-cigar combo for much of the film’s running time. Guy Pearce,
giving his first truly bad performance as the deputy trying to shoot our boys
down, is working from under an angle-grinder haircut, a bow tie, and odd blonde
eyebrows that mark his character down as an antagonistic creep even before he
hands out a brutal kicking to youngest brother Jack Bondurant (Shia LaBeouf),
who at this point isn’t even part of his siblings’ operation.
The
kicking, and punching, and shooting, is essential to the effectiveness of
Cage’s plotting. Every wince we make when some tough or other lays into our
heroes is meant to make it easier for us to cheer when the brothers fight back;
the film is structured around the making of a man, turning LaBeouf’s wimpy kid
into a charging bull via such charming pursuits as the delivery of a pair of
severed testicles to Pearce’s hotel room. Dollars to doughnuts, if you asked
Hillcoat and Cave to list their favourite filmmakers, Peckinpah would show up
sooner or later, but theirs is an uncritical and problematic reading of Uncle
Sam’s filmography, suggesting as it does that the cinema hasn’t moved on (save,
maybe, technically) in some four decades. Violence and vengeance were the
beginning and end of Hillcoat’s earlier Cave collaborations Ghosts… of the Civil Dead and The Proposition, but those films
exhibited greater narrative intelligence in lurching from one extreme to the
other; all Lawless has to lumber
towards is a silly, fly-specked stand-off and a decidedly unpersuasive final
image of family life.
The
general knuckle-dragging gives the women nothing to do, save to be pawed or
otherwise imperilled by the growling alphas around them. This is a particular
waste of Jessica Chastain as the best dressed barkeep in Thirties America,
whose (inferred) rape gives us the first inkling our bloodlust is being
pandered to; when the sanctity of devout, corn-fed girl-next-door Mia
Wasikowska is threatened, we’re meant to take up the pitchforks and flaming
torches unreservedly. Such heavy-handed plotting is a shame, as Lawless is nothing if not a handsome
production, very nearly as pernickety as Pearce’s character in its attention to
period detail – in part, one supposes, to make the pummelled faces and
throat-punching register all the more forcefully. Consider it Hillcoat and
Cave’s own brand of moonshine: potent in gulps, but all too crudely filtered,
and just as likely to leave a bad taste in the mouth as it is to intoxicate.
Lawless opens nationwide today.
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