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 American
lore is rife with stories around the dark days of Prohibition. It was
an era in our history that couldn’t have been more ill-timed with most
of the country suffering and out of work due to the Great Depression.
Some of the most enduring tales are those about that Robin Hood figure,
the bootlegger, and the romantic notion that these resourceful folks
took advantage of home-grown skills to provide liquor to a thirsty
nation. Rarely does that story walk alone; almost always further down
the page is the involvement of the gangster, usually the mass-market
purveyor of the moonshiner’s illegal intoxicants, and subsequently law
enforcement’s efforts to apprehend these scofflaws. In Lawless, all
these components crash together for an over-the-top, live-action comic
book overflowing with violence and gore as it tells the real-life tale
of Virginia’s own Bondurant brothers.
There
are some for whom the sole selling point of Lawless is the fact that
they’ll watch Shia LaBeouf’s face get pummeled repeatedly. The
polarising actor plays the weak link of the bootlegging Bondurant
brothers who can’t keep himself out of harm’s way. Jack, the runt of
the litter, does not inspire the fear or awe of his elder siblings,
Forrest and Howard, who are legends in their hometown, doing lucrative
business supplying their homemade hooch all around the county. Using
his brains to compensate for the utter lack of brawn, courage or common
sense so abundant in his brothers, Jack takes the bootlegging operation
to new heights by making risky deals with big city gangsters, bringing
the family both new wealth and more visibility than either Forrest or
Howard would like. Jack simply doesn’t get the whole ‘We’re committing
a crime, maybe we should be stealthy,’ idea. While the youngster
stretches his wings, other changes take place around the Bondurant
homestead, including the employment of a gorgeous moll determined to get
away from the violence of Chicago -- a singularly delusion hope. Jack’s
new finances turn his head as he spends it on fancy duds and rides and
trying to impress a local girl from a super-religious family, with
predictably fatal results. The brothers have drawn the rage of a
government agent who’ll look the other way for a cut, by denying him
simply on principle. As the Bondurants become the officer’s obsession,
everyone within a three-mile radius will feel the aftershocks. Will the
family of wild men survive against the slick, brutal lawman determined
to bring them to heel?
Written by cult icon, musician Nick Cave and based on the story of a
real bootlegging clan, Lawless is a case of truth indeed being stranger
than fiction. Had cloning existed in these dry days of Prohibition, the
elder Bondurant siblings would’ve been prime candidates. No amount of
shooting, stabbing, choking, punching or kicking slows them down. This
is attributed to their having some Native American ancestry, but had the
Tribes been as hard to kill as the Bondurant brothers, we’d all be
wearing feathers and buckskins. Forrest‘s superhuman indestructibility
becomes laughable and an example of the breezy obliviousness to reality
often exhibited by Nick Cave’s screenplay. So what if this is the story
of an actual family and would then be expected to have some basis in
reality; a man can have his throat sliced from ear to ear, be shot
multiple times, stabbed some more and survive wonderfully. That can
totally happen. If you can’t go with that notion, then turn around and
leave the theatre now. Lawless is not for you. Equally surreal is the
bad cop, played by the excellent Guy Pearce, himself looking like a
cartoon character with a creepy lack of eyebrows, dandyish dress sense
and shoe-polish black hair slicked back within an inch of its
existence. He’s an oily, sleazebag caricature of every corrupt officer
ever filmed and he nearly steals the entire picture, seizing the part
with gleeful, scene-chomping gusto. Speaking of cinematic police on the
take, Leon/The Professional’s iconic bad guy, Gary Oldman is solidly on
the other side of the law in a very few but campily impactful scenes as
the big city gangster boss who’s canny enough not to get on the feral
Bondurant’s bad sides. As the low man on the siblings’ intellectual
totem pole, Jason Clarke is an unstoppable hulk as Howard, who prefers
to beat first and ask questions maybe. It’s a far cry from the
Machiavellian politician he played on the excellent Showtime series,
Brotherhood (Also about scapegrace siblings), and
Clarke really digs in to the brute. Jessica Chastain is alluring as the
bad girl trying to be good; a world-weary soul caught up in a battle
that’s got nothing to do with her, but she staunchly chooses a side
anyway, when saner voices might’ve said, ‘You know, this is a whole lot
worse than the craziness I tried to escape from in the first place. Heck
with these people, I’m going home.’ Her scenes opposite Tom Hardy as
the rough-hewn, grunting, monosyllabic Forrest simmer nicely and their
growing attraction plays nicely. As the war escalates and casualties
grow more brutal, the climactic scene is almost comical in its
violence-drenched nonsensicalness, but goes so well with the entire
over-the-top sensibility we’ve witnessed for the previous hour and a
half, it only seems like icing on the cake. More hilarious still is the
epilogue, that even if essentially true is almost entirely anticlimactic
as it’s meant to tie some of sort of cockeyed bow on all the nutty
nihilism we’ve just seen.
Weird,
just weird is Lawless, but strangely pleasing in pulpy, thoroughly
B-movie way, held to the earth by the thinnest thread of gravity
provided by its cast's game and exuberant performances.
~ The
Lady Miz Diva
Aug 31st,
2012
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