Lawless (John Hillcoat, 2012)

[Jeff]

This sure doesn't look like your usual Cannes competition selection, but it does look pretty good, and it's got a helluva cast.

Here's the trailer.

[Professor Wagstaff]

I barely recognized Guy Pearce (in the long shots I thought it was Michael Rooker). His scenery chewing definitely has my attention. Hopefully this, Prometheus, and the announced Iron Man 3 role will push him more into the public consciousness as one of the most undervalued performers around.

[flyonthewall2983]

Don't forget Lockout. Many likely will, but it's good to see him in a lead role of anything that might be seen by a wide audience.

[Finch]

PB doesn't like Lawless

Lawless is a handsome-looking film, with a reasonably winning lead performance from Shia LaBeouf. But it's basically a smug, empty exercise in macho-sentimental violence in which we are apparently expected to root for the lovable good ol' boys, as they mumble, shoot, punch and stab. Our heroes manage to ensnare the affections of preposterously exquisite young women, and the final flurry of self-adoring nostalgia is borderline-nauseating.

however, his own colleague Xan Brooks and other UK critics do:

Xan Brooks:

Bootleg thriller LAWLESS goes down like moonshine. Cheap gut-rot that packs a punch. Liked the bluegrass version of White Light/White Heat

Jonathan Romney:

Bootlegger drama LAWLESS - 100 per cent rotgut.

Damon Wise:

Lawless is great; gripping, bloody and characterful with terrific script by Nick Cave. Bravo, sirs!

[Jeff]

I'm told Harvey took LAWLESS out of Hillcoat's hands and re-cut it. Badly.

Theories why LAWLESS is even in Cannes (where it doesnt deserve to be) include Harvey's quid pro quo for having Q's DJANGO in 2013 Cannes

Reviews from Kevin Jagernauth and Guy Lodge make it sound like at least solid entertainment if not particularly Cannes-y.

[mfunk9786]

I'm told Harvey took LAWLESS out of Hillcoat's hands and re-cut it. Badly.

Theories why LAWLESS is even in Cannes (where it doesnt deserve to be) include Harvey's quid pro quo for having Q's DJANGO in 2013 Cannes

That makes no sense re: Django, as it's slated for a release on Christmas in the US this year. So I'm not putting much credence in the first post - sounds like this guy has an axe to grind. I'm hoping that PTA doesn't run into any issues with The Master, and has final cut and all that right there in his contract.

[ianungstad]

Hillcoat had final cut on Lawless. When they were selling the picture at the Cannes film market last year, Relativity Media actually offered more money than the Weinsteins for distribution rights but were declined as they wouldn't agree to let Hillcoat have final cut of the picture. Harvey agreed to those terms.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

Theories why LAWLESS is even in Cannes (where it doesnt deserve to be) include Harvey's quid pro quo for having Q's DJANGO in 2013 Cannes

That makes no sense re: Django, as it's slated for a release on Christmas in the US this year.

Plus it's getting a commercial release in France on January 16th. Why on earth would Cannes screen it five months later?

[Jeff]

I think Koehler is speculating that Django will get bumped and debut at Cannes instead. Doesn't sound particularly likely to me either, but you never know. The film is still shooting, and Kurt Russell and Sacha Baron Cohen were both announced as dropped from the cast after filming started, so who knows what's going on.

Just because Hillcoat supposedly had contractual final cut doesn't mean he wasn't intimidated in to making changes. It certainly wouldn't be the first time such stories had surfaced about Weinstein.

Koehler may have an axe to grind, but I don't think he's just talking out his ass. Besides being a critic for Variety, Film Comment, et. al., he's been head programmer for the AFI Festival, a UCLA instructor, and a Cannes juror.

[Cold Bishop]

So did anyone see this? I had high hopes: the book wasn't great, but it had the material for a great adaptation, and it sounded right up Hillcoat and Cave's alley. But, I don't know: the thing just never breathes to me. It feels completely lightweight... if you can call a movie full of beatings, shootings and throat-slashings lightweight.

[Jeff]

So did anyone see this? I had high hopes: the book wasn't great, but it had the material for a great adaptation, and it sounded right up Hillcoat and Cave's alley. But, I don't know: the thing just never breathes to me. It feels completely lightweight... if you can call a movie full of beatings, shootings and throat-slashings lightweight.

It feels like there are a lot of narrative elisions. That's especially true when a section of the plot is fast-forwarded through via a montage and clunky voiceover. Despite a few fun scenes, some great cinematography, and solid performances, it never really coalesces into a complete film. Lightweight indeed.

[Cold Bishop]

We're stepping into the "movie vs. novel" fallacy, viewed unfavorably around these parts (with good reason), but this is inevitable: the final product inspires so little passion of its own making, I can't think of anywhere else to begin a discussion.

The movie actually does a "good" job of compressing the action of the novel (except for a few understandably omitted sub-plots, such as the entire parallel narrative involving Sherwood Anderson). The problem is it does nothing else. The whole thing feels perfunctory, moving from plot-point to plot-point, occasionally creating a startling moment (usually moments of violence) but mostly lacking any urgency or poignancy. The book isn't great, but it at least understands that the central conflict (bootleggers vs. lawmen) isn't in itself compelling without that certain impetus that comes from the evocation of a specific milieu (the red-clay dirt hillbilly backfields of Virgina), of a particular brand of professionalism (the bootlegger, distinct from the traditional mob in just how ingrained it is in day-to-day life), of a certain tortured outlook (the Bondurant's family near-kinship with death and violence). Hillcoat and Cave do much to keep narrative moving, but they do little to ground it within that milieu.

In fact, I was disappointed to find my two favorite passages from the book completely absent. I mention these, not because I feel the movie should be chained to the novel, nor because I feel Hillcoat and Cave could have knocked these scenes out of the park, but because I feel they tap into something that the movie desperately needed to.

1) The prologue, glossed over in one sentence by Labeouf's narration, where half of the Bondurant clan succumbs to the Spanish Flu, teenage Forest following behind. The bodies, wrapped in white bedding, arranged across the living room... then suddenly, Forest emerges from his sickbed, emaciated, but hardened and aged beyond his years.

2) The delirious, drunk-typed chapter (briefly re-appropriated into the film) where the Bondurant brothers are invited to a black family's funeral, which quickly turns into a drunken, hellraising of a party, everything joyous and raucous. Then suddenly, for seemingly no reason than drunken boredom and an implacable impulse, the Bondurants start an unnervingly violent brawl, ending with one of the black men beaten half to death and them defiantly walking off into the forested night.

It's easy to see why both were cut: they're extraneous to the main body of the narrative, the war between the Bondurants and Rakes, and as such, easy to excise. The latter, especially, comes with all sort of uncommercial connotations, with a group of white "heroes" suddenly bashing a group of blacks (although race is hardly the motivating force of the passage). In fact, the film goes out of its way to invoke the second passage, but rewrite it. Now the Bondurants don't pick a fight with a partygoer, but instead mercilessly beat a group of racists trying to prevent them from selling liquor to the black populace. There's something pat and disingenuous about it: it seems to be there only to show us that the Bondurants aren't those kind of southerners (although, ironically, they no longer "integrate" into the party, as in the book). But what they add to the atmosphere of the book... what the movie desperately needed... what Hillcoat has show in his last three films to be his stock and trade... was the haunted atmosphere of violence, always following at the Bondurants' heels, until, as in the last passage, they no longer feel comfortable in their surroundings without calling it forth themselves. That's the part of the book that I thought was best suited to Hillcoat and Cave, but they trade it in... for what exactly?... a thoroughly commercial genre film?

This is what I'm talking about with the film never breathing, even when it seems so easy, given the pedigree, for it to have done so. Take the soundtrack, something that has been the highpoint of Hillcoat's last two films. I don't doubt the soundtrack works fine as an album (the songs sounded great!), but the way they're integrated into the film leaves a lot to be desired. Maybe it's just because I recently came off rewatching a stunning masterpiece like Maldone - with its wild, frenzied centerpiece of a provincial dance - but something like the opening scene, set at the barn-party, captures so little of the joy and energy you think would accompany such a thing in real life. Or the scene in the church with the Sacred Harp singing. You think Cave and Hillcoat, of all people, would be able to emphasize with relish the link between religious and musical ecstasy that such a ritual represents. But no... they brush past it to keep the story moving.

And what is the moral of the story ultimately: the runt of the litter grows to be as violent (and, therefore as masculine) as his brothers? I've seen a few reviews compare this to The Godfather, but that film understood the transformation as a tragedy. In this film it's a triumph. Another thing it loses from the book: Jack's contradictory aspirations. On one hand, he wants to be the feared bandits his brothers are legendary as. On the other, he wants to escape the poverty and squalor of rural Virginia. In the film, Jack's increasingly luxurious tastes are simply youthful new-money boasting; in the book, it's cosmopolitan pretension, a play for the distant life he's quietly aspiring to.

That piece of character development may have been expendable in the scheme of Hillcoat-Cave's telling of the story. But then again, one of the themes they briefly invoke, then ignore, is the imagining of the Bondurants-Lawmen fued as one of rural ingenuity and self-reliance vs. big-city strongarm tactics. How else to explain the rather ridiculous embellishment of turning Charlie Rakes into a "Special Deputy from Chicago" (I doubt a Chicago lawman would have much truck in Virginia). Likewise, the ideas put forth of the way the Bondurants construct their own myth and "control the fear" equally come to nothing. I feel the whole throat-slashing/rape mystery was handled awkwardly: the big reveal at the end (if you can call it that) elicited laughter from the audience I saw it with. Not entirely unintentional... Tom Hardy's pretty funny in the film... but I doubt it was the effect they wanted, nor the one it needed.

I really wanted to like the film, and I still hope someone clocks in here having gleamed something meaningful from the film, something they'll make me reconsider. But I'd be lying if I said my first thought after it ended wasn't "they blew it". A great movie could be drawn out from the book, but they just weren't able to crack it. It's a movie about blood feuds, with all the emphasis on the feud, none of it on the blood. No, not the gore; it has plenty of that. But rather that deep sense of place, tone and sensibility that gets under your skin. For all their faults, The Proposition and The Road had that. This feels sadly like a step backwards.

[Kellen]

Well this was a disappointing experience, and I hate saying that because this was one of the film's that I was really looking forward to.

[mfunk9786]

Thanks for the detailed review!

[tarpilot]

Delete Kellen's post and see the sarcasm vanish before your very eyes!

[Floyd]

I would mostly agree with Cold Bishop in just about all his feelings about the film. Though with what it is, it succeeds pretty well as a fun genre picture. I haven't seen any of Hillcoat's other films so I don't have much to base this film on when comparing his other films. I feel at least when I go to the movies at multiplexes I have to judge it somewhat on a Hollywood movie scale in comparison to my normal scale as I am being run through something different and I am aware of it beforehand. In light of that the movie does what it would be nice Hollywood would always do, a very good acting ensemble (mainly Hardy, Pearce & surprisingly Shia) and a movie that moves relatively quickly and engages the audience without being lost in some muck of fast cuts and crowd pleasing. I saw it in a packed theater and in that environment its a good testament to hear the hatred Guy Pearce created with his character. I found it an entertaining few hours.

[Professor Wagstaff]

Cold Bishop, was the Guy Pearce character a real person or an amalgam by any chance? The movie hitches a lot on the conflict the brothers have with Pearce and those connected to him, but this as the main thrust of the story didn't work nor did I understand how Pearce had such influence on the police and moonshiners coming from Chicago or his role in general (this may have been explained when I went to complain about the projector bulb being on so low that the picture was nearly black). I don't want to fault the actors, the entire cast gives it their all, Shia LaBeouf in particular, but Cave's screenplay doesn't do a great job of fleshing out characters. For all the attention placed on the brothers and their intense familial bonds, the three actors always felt like strangers shackled together. I kept begging for characters to show a sense of relationship or animosity (for instance, Pearce is mocked for being a dandy-type, but Shia is equally flamboyant in his expensive purchases and I kept hoping for a moment of brotherly teasing, something like that).
The movie would have benefited from going over the ins-and-outs of moonshining and the process of cooking, selling, clan feuding, etc - than build it on this personal conflict. Nothing covered here showed anything about moonshining that hasn't been done before in other movies that probably also understood the trade second hand.

[Cold Bishop]

Pearce's character seemed to be an amalgam of different elements of various deputies in the book, synthesized into one unsavory gent: in fact, the main source isn't Charley Rakes (as he's known in the book) but a character called Jeff Richards. They were all based on real people, but as Bondurant himself played free and easy with facts for the sake of a story, and Cave went even further, the resemblance is very little to compared to the real-life counterparts.

Likewise, there were no Chicago lawmen in the book: they were all, if I recall, from the county seat of Rocky Mount, or other parts of Virginia. The feud essentially came from an attempt by the county's Commonwealth Attorney to create an organized system of graft and protection for the moonshiners who had up to then been basically operating autonomously (and before Prohibition, most moonshine was essentially an inter-family crop, like growing your own tomatoes).

That's why the need to make Rakes a Chicagoan was not only ridiculous, but completely unnecessary: these were mountain-men, use to scraping by on their own mettle alone, and anyone outside the family or the near-community was likely to be viewed with suspicion, if not hostility. A Chicagoan would have been an outsider in Rocky Mount, let alone in the hills.

It might have worked if the film had gone with something a little more mythic in its rural/city dichotomy, something much more attuned to a modern Western. But, while it hints at it, the movie never follows through with it. Which makes it curious how it essentially chooses to rewrite the book's ending:

Spoiler

The fellow moonshiners, hitherto paying protection, suddenly rallying around the Bondurant boys, something that never happens in the book

It feels like something from a different movie: Hillcoat and Cave never do anything to create any sense of community, to introduce or ingratiate us with anyone outside the immediate conflict.

It's interesting finding this Playlist interview with Cave circa Cannes. His interest in the project, the cross-section between "sentimentality & brute violence" could have yielded an interesting angle: Drive already showed how well unabashed romance and macho bloodshed go together. But in the final film, all the romantic female protagonists are pretty much marginalized, simply fulfilling the common function of softening the male leads, and occasionally providing an easy dramatic source of revenge/rescue. To me, the problem with the film is it doesn't seem to have any angle: it bats around a lot of thematic material without settling on developing any of it.

While flawed itself, Arthur Ripley's Thunder Road probably remains the definitive moonshiner film. It also plays out a lot of the themes this film only hints at: the evocation of the subculture, the notion of metropolitan corruption, of fraternal jealousy, the schizoid collusion between macho hell-raising and romantic melodrama... not to mention being a fine damn action movie.

[knives]

I agree with Cold Bishop pretty thoroughly on the narrative portions of things to the extant where I feel many of the criticisms equally apply to his past features, but this time around I'm very much willing to forgive these misappropriated cliffnotes as Hillcoat doesn't seem to be attempting to do anything with the narrative and instead is just making a gorgeous movie. It's practically like a giallo in terms of throwing away narrative concern in favor of an interesting image (the comic book ending is worth it for the silhouetted shots of LaBeouf and Pearce). There were even a couple of moments that played out like if Bava had made a good western though the violence clearly has more in common with later generations (the throat scene is basically the same as Bucci's death in Suspiria). Every moment seems to be built more to be visually arresting rather than narratively compelling which is of course problematic in its own way. So maybe the film is not great, but it is better than the usual Hillcoat through sheer beauty.

[Cold Bishop]

The thing is: I didn't find it all that visually compelling. The switch to digital did the film no favor, and I felt there way too much formless handheld nonsense. I know Hillcoat can make a gorgeous movie, but this didn't even work as style over substance.

[knives]

I doubt it would work as that for everybody, but the humour mixed with the more Italian shooting style (the only thing that stood out as Malick aping to me was the shot of the snow falling as Chastain drives by) worked well enough for me. The film is not great, but compared to Hillcoat's low standards I was pleasantly surprised that it knew what it was and just tried to look good more than anything else. It is not Argento or Bava (let alone someone like Suzuki), but it is better than most American action films.