If you’re going to make a Prohibition Era mob movie set in the South, you might as well do it right. Your setting will have to bleed Southern, like a bullet-riddled Confederate soldier in the War of Northern Aggression. Moss and kudzu will have to drip from the trees; clapboard houses will have to look like a good push would bring them down; and small towns will have to be sparsely populated piles of rubble no Christian soul would walk at night. You’ll have to set the majority of the action in the hills, where there are more crickets than people; white lightning will have to flow from these mountains like water down the Mississippi; and the whole thing will have to be cast in a dusty pallor.
Your characters will seem to have been scratched up from the dirt. While you’ll have a thoroughly vile villain, most of the characters will have good backwoods hearts but find themselves doing work that runs contrary to the law. No one, especially the law, will be without sin, but rather the characters will be flawed, like you and me. Even the snow-white preacher girl for whom one of the gangsters falls will have a rebellious streak.
And the violence will have to be brutal. In this world, a man could be making moonshine one second and be lying in a pool of his own blood the next, his throat slit from ear to ear. The men in the movie will have to accept violence as an occupational necessity and be good at using it.
Oh, and you’ll have to have Gary Oldman with a Tommy gun brazenly turning a Model T into Swiss cheese in broad daylight. If you can’t get Gary, it would be best to shut the whole thing down.
The director of “Lawless,” John Hillcoat, did get Gary. And he got everything else right, too. Based on a true story, as recorded in the 2008 novel, “The Wettest County in the World, “Lawless” stars Tom Hardy, Jason Clarke and Shia LaBeouf as the Bondurant Brothers, bootleggers in Franklin County, Va., during the Prohibition Era.
The brothers – Forrest, Howard and Jack – are local legends. Having survived several close calls with the Grim Reaper, people claim they’re invincible – a word one of them doesn’t even know. When Forrest survives his throat being cut, one local boy says, “He walked all the way to the hospital with his head cut clean off!” One thing about them is no exaggeration: they make the best white lighting in several counties.
This draws the unwanted attention of Special Agent Charlie Rakes from Chicago. As played by Guy Pearce, Rakes is as loathsome a thug as I’ve seen in a movie. When Forrest refuses to give Rakes a piece of the Bondurant pie, the agent makes it his business to demonstrate his shockingly low regard for human life.
The actors did more than perfect the hillbilly accent; they slipped into the skin of these men and brought them back to life. LaBeouf takes center stage as Jack, the narrator and cowardly youngest brother. As good as he is, Hardy is even better as Forrest, a man for whom grunts serve as nouns, verbs and adjectives, and whose brass knuckles fill in the parts of speech he doesn’t know.
Providing distractions for Jack and Forrest are, respectively, Bertha and Maggie, women with the power to make a man rethink his ways. Hillcoat handles these romances with great skill and uses them to build dramatic tension.
Hillcoat excels at building pressure and then letting it explode. In a scene involving Jack and Bertha, he slowly develops a mounting dread that made me realize how long it had been since I’d cared about what happens to the characters in a movie.
What Hillcoat and his screenwriter, Nick Cave, didn’t do is tell a story with thematic weight. Despite hitting many pitch-perfect notes, “Lawless” employs a conventional narrative with little going on beneath the surface. I would have liked more meat.
Regardless, I loved “Lawless.” It opens the door to a violent but deeply human world and then shuts it behind you once you’ve stepped through, allowing you to immerse yourself in every blood-soaked and beautiful moment. That these men actually lived makes it all the more compelling.
Rated R for violence and sex. Three and a half stars out of four. Email David Laprad at dlaprad@hamiltoncountyherald.com.