Lawless
Cast: Tom
Hardy, Guy Pearce, Shia LeBeouf, Gary Oldman
Director: John Hillcoat
Running time: 115 mins
Director: John Hillcoat
Running time: 115 mins
John Hillcoat’s Lawless is a based on a true story of a Prohibition-era of hooch, hillbillies, and a bootlegging band of brothers that stood up to a legally sanctioned shakedown. Hillcoat’s new collaboration with The Proposition’s writer/composer Nick Cave, is another type of story of kinship and consequence, and, like that film, of how one brother’s actions come to test the bonds between all three. Where The Proposition was a stark, Gothic Western set in regional Queensland, here the setting is Franklin County, Virginia, with the proliferation of rum-runners in its hills.
The Bondurant brothers – Forrest (Tom Hardy), Harold (Jason Clarke) and Jack (Shia LeBeouf) – keep themselves to themselves in Franklin County, quietly distilling a premium-strength brew, which they deliver to satisfied customers within the local community, not forgetting its constabulary. Forrest runs the show, and keeps a set of knuckledusters stashed in his woolly cardigan pockets, for swift and tidy conflict resolution. Howling Harold’s brute force provides additional security, especially when he’s spent the afternoon at the distillery. Jack is the family bantamweight who talks quickly and aspires to break out of his big brothers’ shadow.
The top-notch casting personifies the required checklist of competing masculine archetypes; For those who would doubt the plausibility of bloodlines between broody brick shit house-built Hardy and talky ‘runt’ LeBeouf, there’s no apparent evidence of any childhood torment which may have signposted the latter’s lifelong game of catch-up, to account for Jack’s diminutive frame. Aspirational to a fault, Jack spies a market opportunity and cuts a deal with a machine-gun-toting mobster (a desperately under-utilised Gary Oldman). The brothers’ booming trade and Jack’s snappy suits draw the eye of the corrupt Prohibition Agents, including a sinister special agent Rakes (Guy Pearce), a centre-parting dyed black-hair and shaved eyebrows dandy with a seething bloodlust.
In a prologue jam-packed with exposition, Cave’s screenplay has Jack explain that aside from illegal booze, the brothers also cultivate something of a reputation for invincibility, stemming from Forrest’s notoriety for escaping even the most life-threatening of scrapes. This relentless signposting in Cave’s script guarantees an abundance of bone cracking, neck-slitting and garrotting opportunities, to put that ‘invincibility’ theory to the test. Hillcoat directs with a steady pace, with requisite tension and compounding menace, assisted from Cave’s score with Warren Ellis. Apart from the testosterone fuelled male play, Jessica Chastain and Mia Wasikowska also appear as the Bonderant boys’ damaged, headstrong dames (the former an ex-fan-dancer from Chicago, relocated, inexplicably, to the backwoods of Virginia to wait tables in the brothers’ legitimate business concern).
Tom Hardy is solid, as always (literally, and figuratively) and casts an ominous menace throughout proceedings whilst LeBeouf is a surprising standout, as his brother’s polar opposite. The other characterisations are all less convincing, however, especially Pearce’s pantomime villainy, which stands out for all the wrong reasons.
Cave’s script provides even the grunting Hardy with occasional snippets of southern lyricism, but poor Pearce gets saddled with some woeful dialogue (“Time for me to take out the garbage,” he cries, in the midst of a blazing gun battle) which is groan-worthy. Despite that, Pearce is still a mesmering presence and a superb actor, but it’s Hardy’s film - he just goes from strength to strength (just don’t mention “This Means War”!)
