Short on real authenticity, long on potboiler fiction

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Shia LaBeouf as Jack and Tom Hardy as Forrest in Lawless. (ALLIANCE)

Movie review

Lawless

• Starring Shia Labeouf and Tom Hardy
• Grant Park, Polo Park, Towne
• 14A
• 115 minutes
• 2 stars out of five

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Jason Clark, from left, Hardy and LaBeouf ini Lawless. (ALLIANCE)

It was said the movie The Dark Knight Rises required a little audio repair prior to release because Tom Hardy's villain Bane sounded like a faulty drive-thru speaker.

Hardy plays more of an anti-hero in Lawless as Forrest Bondurant, the alpha moonshiner in a family-run business operating out of Franklin County, Virginia, during Prohibition. This time, Hardy is just plain marble-mouthed, evidently in an effort to capture the twang of an authentic southern cracker.

Alas, there are no subtitles.

This film is based on Matt Bondurant's fact-based novel The Wettest County in the World, which combines moonshiner-vs. revenuer conflict with gangster movie convention. Evidently, not all the illicit hooch sold in Chicago in the '30s was brewed in bathtubs.

Forrest runs the brewing and transport operations of 'shine in his home turf, employing his violent drunkard brother Howard (Jason Clarke) as a watchdog. It is the youngest brother Jack (Shia LaBeouf) who aspires to respectability, specifically the respectability of the cunning Chicago gangster Floyd Banner (Gary Oldman). This ambition is perversely nurtured when Jack witnesses the dapper Banner execute an enemy with a machine gun.

But Jack is something of a coward, a trait that doesn't serve him well when an interloper comes to Franklin County with the intentions of taking a big cut out of the lucrative moonshine market. The enforcer in question is Charley Rakes (Guy Pearce), a loathsome mobster masquerading as a lawman. With Rakes, director John Hillcoat and screenwriter Nick Cave revive one of the more grievous villain stereotypes from the '70s, the degenerate homosexual psycho.

Between them, Jessica Chastain and Mia Wasikowska offer more conventional supportive feminine presence in the film. Chastain plays a former Chicago fan dancer who comes to work for the Bondurant brothers, ironically, to escape the violence and inhumanity of the big city. Wasikowska plays a Mennonite minister's daughter who becomes the object of affection for Jack. Both are fine in an otherwise mismatched cast.

There is no doubt Hillcoat has assembled quality actors for this ultra-violent take on city slickers versus country bumpkins. But the guys all seem to be acting in different movies. Hardy, the current number one guy when it comes to sheer physical menace, is amusing but as unconvincing as he is incomprehensible. Labeouf holds nothing back emotionally, which means his performance is at cross-purposes with a portrayal of a would-be tough guy. Pearce offers up the weakest portrayal of all, rendering a villain who might as well be a malicious alien from space for all Pearce does to make him a recognizable homo sapien.

Lawless is supposedly a fictionalized history of Matt Bondurant's backwoods ancestry. Hillcoat's heavy hand and this mishmash of performances result in a movie short on real authenticity and fatally long on potboiler fiction.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 29, 2012 D3