Lawless star Tom Hardy
Dressed in tattered, bloody rags and stinking of blackberry moonshine, the leading men of director John Hillcoat’s (The Road) backwoods Prohibition-era saga Lawless positively drip with noir credentials.
No one should be surprised Tom Hardy (The Dark Knight Rises) can pull off playing bootlegger Forrest Bondurant, a tough guy with a brain — let’s call him “good guy Bane” — but Shia LaBeouf (Transformers: Dark of the Moon) does a great job filling his own shoes as the ever-evolving young Jack Bondurant.
All the likeable skullduggery aside, Lawless never becomes the fantastic noir movie it could be. Like a beloved old prospector who can hold onto his whiskey but not his barstool, Lawless constantly teeters on the edge between being an engaging drama and crashing into a mishmash of emotions full of plotlines that go nowhere.
As the film begins, we find the Bondurant boys — Jack, Forrest and Howard (Jason Clarke, Texas Killing Field) — living fruitfully as small-time bootleggers in the mountains of 1920s Virginia. The slick, effeminate new Prohibition deputy Charlie Rakes (Guy Pierce, Prometheus) then rides into town with an unacceptable ultimatum for the boys, leading to an ever-increasing spiral of violence and low-tech distillery building.
Between all the gun battles, rape and gruesome torture scenarios, there is Jack’s compressed coming-of-age story, complete with a preacher’s lovely daughter and some Huckleberry Finn-style church-house shenanigans.
Though it seems contradictory on paper, Lawless is just as funny as it is horrific. Admittedly, it doesn’t work out 100 percent of the time — a few scenes feature awkward tonal transitions from serious to comedic to serious that simply don’t work at all.
Despite all it has going for it, many of the film’s plots are either wrapped up abruptly or never finished. The worst example of this is Jack’s relationship with big city gangster Floyd Banner, played by Gary Oldman (The Dark Knight Rises). Oldman surfaces for little more than an extended cameo, acting as Jack’s gangster idol while serving little other purpose to the plot.
Granted, it’s hard to sneer at a script that has been stained with the sacred seal of “based on a true story.” Given that Lawless is based on the nonfiction book The Wettest County in the World by Matt Bondurant, you can’t really complain about the story development in the movie, and really, you won’t want to.
The pacing, more than anything, is what truly throws Lawless off course. The film constantly piles on more brutality but never feels as though it’s moved on from the second act of the movie. After the first third of Lawless, there is nothing but a slow climb of violent moments and awkward laughs before a sudden, unsurprising conclusion that doesn’t come close to topping any of the awesome moments that came before it.
Lawless still has a lot to offer viewers. Most of all, its original setting — which takes bootlegging into deep mountain country instead of the big city a la HBO’s Boardwalk Empire — should be intriguing enough to get audiences to stick around and discover Hardy’s scene-stealing performance along with all the bone-crushing gore.
A few more distillations could have made Lawless even better, but honestly, no one takes a drink just for the taste. Despite its imperfections, Lawless is still bound to show audiences a good time.
berman@umdbk.com
