Why a movie doesn’t work is not necessarily a complicated or mysterious thing. Sometimes the reason is surprisingly simple. Take the case of Lawless. Despite everything the production has going for it-a great director, a gifted screenwriter, an inspired score and more acting talent than you can shake a Thompson Gun at-it doesn’t work. At first glance, that might seem baffling.
So let’s take a second glance. The latest from Australian-born filmmaker John Hillcoat (The Road) is based on Matt Bondurant’s 2008 fact-based novel The Wettest County in the World. It’s a fictionalized account of his bootlegging grandfather and two granduncles and events which took place in Franklin County, Virginia during the early 1930s. See, there’s your problem: The Wettest County is just not a particularly interesting book.
All the money and moviemaking savvy in the world can’t turn ho-hum source material into riveting cinema so it should come as no surprise that Lawless does not rivet. There’s a reason nobody’s made a motion picture about the Bondurant Boys before now. As ruthless, gun-toting gangs go, they’re kind of on the snoozy side.
You know a character’s dull when Tom Hardy can’t make anything memorable out of it. He’s one of the finest, most inventive actors on the planet and yet his Forrest Bondurant, the oldest of the brothers and the brains of the outfit, is a bore who grunts incoherently and favors cardigan sweaters. He has a reputation as the toughest man in the Appalachian hills but presents like a mumbly Fred MacMurray.
Hardy’s British. Middle brother Howard, the outfit’s enforcer, is played by the Australian actor Jason Clarke. The runt of the litter, Jack, is played by Transformers star Shia LaBeouf (really). Taking these three seriously as siblings, each sporting his own distinct accent, requires big time suspension of disbelief to put it kindly.
As completely reimagined by the author and adapted by Nick Cave, the Bondurants’ story is a bloody but straightforward one: They run moonshine. When a Special Agent from Chicago named Charley Rakes (Guy Pearce) arrives on the scene demanding a piece of the action, they refuse to cooperate. Shooting ensues. The End.
Hillcoat takes various stabs at padding the saga in an attempt to make it seem more epic than it really is. He has Pearce play Rakes as a sadistic glove-wearing dandy; He has Gary Oldman commit a selection of violent acts in a cameo as a big city crime boss; he has Jessica Chastain play a former showgirl who falls for Forrest and Mia Wasikowska play a preacher’s daughter who falls for Jack. Neither these narrative tangents nor the production’s numerous quirky touches (a hillbilly rendition of Lou Reed’s “White Light, White Heat?”) add much to the proceedings unfortunately. They just make the movie longer than you’re likely to wish it were.
On the upside, it’s not as though anyone hankering for a Hillcoat period piece about a band of brothers on the wrong side of the law has to make do with this watered down concoction. The Proposition mixed pretty much the same ingredients in 2005 and the result was strong stuff. That was a movie that worked.
This is the worst worst review of a good movie that has ever been written, and I suspect your mother had sordid relations with Levon Helm.