One of the movies I was looking the most forward to this summer (and now that summer is officially over, I’ll probably repost that list later today) was “Lawless.” I thought “Tom Hardy, Jessica Chastain, Shia Lebouf, Jason Clarke, Gary Oldman, and Guy Pearce working off a script from the guy who wrote The Proposition and the director who did that and The Road. How can this movie be bad?” Well, it turns out, it can be. To be clear, Lawless isn’t very bad and it is certainly watchable, but it is also weirdly lifeless and arbitrary, waiting around for something interesting to develop that never quite does.
What Works: Jessica Chastain is an amazing actress. If she’s not a star-of-tomorrow then life is very cruel. Even though her character is not given a whole lot to do, she finds interesting things to do despite that, and I was drawn to her anytime she was on screen as everyone else seems a little too caught up in fussy, mannered performances that never feel genuine.
What Doesn’t Work: Let me be clear: Tom Hardy, Jason Clarke, Guy Pearce, Shia Lebouf, Dane Dehaan, and Gary Oldman (who isn’t really given anything to do) are all very good to great actors. I just think there was a collective miscasting effort to put them all in a movie about backwoods Virginia bootleggers in the 30’s. It seems more like an affected indie filmmaker’s idea of how that time period would go than anything truly authentic. For their part, Nick Cave (the Australian indie rocker who wrote the script) and John Hillcoat (the Australian director who previously collaborated with Cave on the equally good-in-theory, unsatisfying-in-reality Western “The Propostition”) also practice a misfire approach of trying to get everything right while really getting everything wrong. It might not have hurt the project if ANY of the top people involved had been from the Southeast.
Guy Pearce chews the scenery as an ultra-dandy, corrupt government honcho. Tom Hardy chews it in a different way by continuing his Brando impersonation of grunts and mumbles. Shia looks confused. And the whole thing just seems like a lot of very talented people (including the film’s indie financiers, who champion unconventional stories…and could have financed a more worthy one) that could have spent their time and money doing something else.
What I Would Have Done Differently: I have to admit that I don’t fully get the obsession with boot legging that Hollywood now seems to enjoy. Honestly, it kind of seems like just another escapist dodge of what’s going on in the world. They can make a “gritty” movie about a long-gone era everyone has already learned about, and avoid tackling the current-world drug trade. It may be time to finally make The Godfather of Russian crime movies or a biopic of Chapo Guzman (Mexico’s top crime lord who routinely makes the Forbes 400 list…even while an official fugitive), but let’s stop pretending that the “outlaws” of bootlegging haven’t already had their stories told.
Hate to hear that it is a possible dud. Your reviews are spot on sooooooooooo I probably won’t waste my money.