Lawless Review

John Hillcoat’s middle name could be Bleak. John Bleak Hillcoat. He has made his name over the past few years directing the hugely successful The Proposition, a violent and meditative film about criminals and lawmen in the Australian Outback and The Road, an adaptation of the novel by Cormac McCarthy which follows a father and son making their way across a post-apocalyptic America. His latest effort, Lawless, captures that same feeling of bleakness and, in many ways, desperation, that his characters regularly seem to battle with, but in a much lighter manner.

Lawless, which sees him team up again with musician Nick Cave, who wrote the screenplay for The Proposition and does so here, tells the story of the Bondurant brothers – Howard (Jason Clarke), Forrest (Tom Hardy) and Jack (Shia LaBeouf) – who make and sell moonshine liquor in Franklin County, Virginia, during the Prohibition period. They don’t have a lot but they get by – they have no other option. Things are going pretty well until a special agent from out-of-town, Charley Rakes (Guy Pearce), turns up with the intention of clearing house.

Something that becomes evident as the film goes on is the fact that it feels like it’s trying to be The Godfather (tropes include Jack as the youngest trying to take more responsibility with his brothers denying him a la Michael Corleone and the prologue and epilogue designed to give the film the feel of an epic), but it isn’t anywhere near the length it needs to be for an epic like that and as a result it comes in overlong in terms of the length it perhaps should have been. We follow Forrest and Jack’s dalliances with two women, Maggie (Jessica Chastain) and Bertha (Mia Wasikowska) respectively and, while the two actresses perform well, neither needed to be in the film and neither gets enough screen time to make anything like the impression we know they can. This is a man’s world, where violence is king, and the addition of women seems not only forced but slows the pacing down too far – this could have been a punchy eighty-five or ninety minutes but clocks in just shy of two hours. Things aren’t helped by the addition of Gary Oldman as big-town gangster Floyd Banner – as good as he is and although his addition helps to resolve a couple of plot points, they’re not so big that they couldn’t have been resolved in a different way and, as a result, his scenes only serve to bloat the film unnecessarily.

When things remain focussed on the conflict between the Bondurants and Charley Rakes, things take a turn for the better. Hardy as the stoic, monosyllabic Forrest is both menacing in his demeanour and endearing in his quiet longing for Maggie, while Pearce’s effeminate glove-wearing appearance and tittering, quick-to-anger performance makes Rakes both pantomime villain and threatening adversary. Forrest acts as the only thing standing between Rakes and his brothers, the young and cocky Jake and the moonshine-addled Howard and whenever he’s out of the picture, Rakes usually makes someone suffer – it’s clear that the Bondurants have no other choice than to run bootleg moonshine across county, and either them or Rakes will have to go. Regardless of what we’re seeing, Hillcoat frames it beautifully and injects humour into situations we normally wouldn’t find funny as a method of getting us to root for characters we normally wouldn’t dream of rooting for.

Although it wanted to be a slow-burning gangster epic, Lawless ultimately comes in too short to achieve its aims, and in the process becomes too long to act as a quick, violent snapshot of a violent period. Redeemed by Hillcoat’s direction and the performances of Chastain, Hardy and Pearce, this is at least an example of a film that reached for greatness and fell short, rather than a film that didn’t even get off the launch pad.

3.5/5