Lawless

A pretty, if dim-witted, gangster picture, John Hillcoat’s “Lawless” concerns three hillbilly moonshiners, the Bondurant brothers in Franklin County, Virginia. The film purports to be extracted from real life, a “true story”, but the narrative, at least, is implausible -- the hillbillies act as if they are cunning tough-guys but they are forever falling into ambushes that every dullard in the audience can see coming. Nick Cave wrote the script and it consists of guttural threats and whispers so that nothing much is intelligible -- it doesn’t much matter because the film is nothing but reprisal and counter-reprisal with a little mild romance intervening between castrations and throat-slittings. The film has too many close-ups and the action sequences are gory without being interesting. As is the case with most Hollywood productions, the scenery and the incidental details are atmospheric, rich, and fascinating. We see tattered-looking cabins and moonshining stills out of a Walker Evans’ photograph, lush hollows, and a mountain all lit up with the stars of little independent moonshine distilleries hidden in the Yucatan-like jungles on its slopes. There is a fine shape-singing scene in a church and some interesting interiors of an old road-house that the Bondurant brothers operate 20 miles from town. Jessica Chastain shows her breasts and plays the role of the gun moll to the oldest brother, Forest Bondurant acted by Tom Hardy, a sort of dull-eyed and brutish Kevin Costner lookalike. Shia Laboeuf, if that’s his name, is annoying as the youngest brother, too kind and gentle before the massacres begin to even butcher a hog -- of course, Michael Corleone-style he will take up the gun and murder people before the film is over. Guy Pearce plays a variant on the Jack Palance character in “Shane” -- the fearsome dandy in black, an assassin who is also, apparently, some kind of sexual pervert. The gun battles and atrocities are, more or less, realistically staged but this is the kind of film in which gangsters engaged in a vicious gang war pause, now and then, to pursue their romantic interest, something that usually leads to more killings and hostage-taking. It’s also the kind of film in which the good guys engage in harangues when they have their evil enemies at their mercy allowing them to escape so that the film can proceed to more killings and rapes. When we meet a character named “Cricket” it’s pretty obvious that this hapless fellow will be a victim of the gang war -- he’s a character actor and, more or less, expendable. The film looks realistic and is fairly gripping until it isn’t -- and this is most of the overwrought, operatic, and poorly written second half of the movie The picture is pointless and a waste of time with one exception -- a couple times we hear Lou Reed’s “White Light/White Heat” and it sounds like an ancient Appalachian tune; in one instance, the great Ralph Stanley keens the song and it has a primeval authenticity better than anything else in the film.