LAWLESS

I went to see this at the UK premiere as a part of the Film4 Summer Screen season; my (needless to say outstanding) girlfriend bought us tickets as a surprise present. Obviously this reduced me to a child like frenzy of excitement, being as manic a Nick Cave fan as I am. Despite how overexcited I was during the film I will try and review it in as sober a fashion as I can manage.

The first thing that struck me was that the script felt more mature to me than Nick Cave’s previous cinematic outing (The Proposition), maybe this was because it was based on a historical novel, but how it went about its business to me felt different. For example there is a lot of mention of legend in the film, not unusual considering Nick Cave loves the mythology of American folk and blues. Throughout there is a lot of talk about how invincible Tom Hardy’s character seems, which is deconstructed in a single sentence by Jessica Chastain. For all the gruff and lyrical brilliance of Tom Hardy in this film, this small piece of dialogue exposed the humanity beneath legend, which for me improved the film and separated it from the Proposition in terms of scope.

Lawless treads similar ground to The Proposition; brotherhood, mans relationship to violence and life in a brutal environment. However, I felt that the plot of Lawless allowed for broader themes to be looked at. The film set as it is in 1931, runs its course during the Great Depression, and is backlit by economic issues. As such, without addressing it directly, the film demonstrates the despair that drove all manner of men into desperate measures which we see clearly in the character of Cricket, the brewer of Moonshine for the Bondurant brothers. This broadening of theme means that the film is all the richer for it.

As with The Proposition, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis provide the soundtrack for the film. I had read about the track listing of the film before seeing it and to be honest was worried. The soundtrack includes Captain Beefheart and Velvet Underground covers which sounded awesome, but too much like what I’d like to hear on the next Bad Seeds album. I shouldn’t have worried. The soundtrack was brilliant, deftly switching styles and moods; definitely one of the best bits about the film.

The film has a superb cast, just brilliant. My personal highlight was Tom Hardy who has, let’s face it, had a blinding year. I never thought I’d see a man manage to look menacing in a cardigan, but he manages it in spades. In a recent interview Nick Cave said that Tom Hardy told him he would play the character like an ‘old lesbian’, emphasising the maternal nature of the character. I’m not entirely sure what he meant but it definitely worked; sensational work from Tom. Even Shia LeBeouf was great, impeccably playing the younger brother trying to assert himself in a violent world; I even forgot about Even Stevens when he was on screen. To be honest, there was not a single bad performance and I think Jessica Chastain and Mia Wasikowska also deserve special mention. That brings us to Guy Pearce. Guy plays a cruel and unusual man, a reptilian bellend who’s driven by all sorts of complexes to belittle everyone else and enforce some weird interpretation of justice. I thought of a prototype J Edgar Hoover, with no eyebrows. It must be hard to play such a monumental dickhead but Guy Pearce pulled it off with aplomb.

Gary Oldman is billed highly in all the posters and trailers for Lawless which meant when it came round to watching the film I expected to see a lot of him. Most of his scenes are already in the trailers. Gary plays a big league gangster with a line in moonshine and as I saw it was in the film to demonstrate that there was a criminal world outside of the Bondurant brothers and to provide an outlet for Shia LeBeouf to try and prove himself. However, because of him being Gary Oldman and because he is sold as a large part of the film, this confused the hell out of me. I have read several reviews which were critical of this role but I think this is the fault of the distribution company. This brings me to my major gripe with the film, how it is advertised. The film sold in trailers and posters is nothing like the film proper. Trailers show a generic gangster flick with lots of gunfire and lots of Gary Oldman; they’re wrong. Lawless is much more nuanced than all that and the violence that there is, is brutal, dirty and fast. I think of it as a gruffly stylised historical portrait whereas the trailers seem to think it is, well, shit. I worry that this will damage how the film performs and is seen but there is little that can be done about this now.  

Final thought: go and see it!