7/4/14: Moonshine Over My Hammy

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bad cops, based on a book, based on a true story, Benoit Delhomme, bootleggers, brothers, Chris McGarry, cinema, corrupt law enforcement, Dane DeHaan, film reviews, films, Gary Oldman, Guy Pearce, Jason Clarke, Jessica Chastain, John Hillcoat, Lawless, Mia Wasikowska, moonshine, Movies, Nick Cave, period-piece, romance, set in the 1930s, Shia LeBeouf, the Great Depression, The Proposition, The Road, Tom Hardy, voice-over narration

There are some writer/director relationships that end up bearing more interesting fruit than others and the pairing of Australian director John Hillcoat and post-punk savant Nick Cave is certainly one of those. Beginning with the brutal Ghosts…of the Civil Dead (1988) and continuing on into the equally raw The Proposition (2005), Hillcoat and Cave have proved a formidable team: Hillcoat is a masterful director who’s able to wring genuine pathos out of Cave’s often unpleasant, animalistic but eternally vital characters. Stylistically, Cave’s voice approximates Cormac McCarthy’s tales of moral decay, explosive violence and doomed fatalism, which are only complimented by Hillcoat’s panoramic, sweeping visuals. When it was revealed that Hillcoat and Cave’s next pairing would be an adaptation of Matt Bondurant’s novel about his bootlegging family, The Wettest County in the World, I was interested to see how the two native Australians would be able to bring their particular vision to bear on Prohibition-era rural Virginia. Turns out, there’s still plenty of brutality to go around, although Lawless (2012) ends up feeling like a much different beast than either Ghosts…of the Civil Dead or The Proposition.

Lawless involves the various machinations of the Bondurant family: brothers Jack (Shia LaBeouf), Forrest (Tom Hardy) and Howard (Jason Clarke). The brothers run one of the biggest, most impressive bootlegging operations in rural Virginia and are something of local gods, particularly when one factors in the local legend about the Bondurant’s invincibility (an interesting hint of magical realism that also informed bits of The Proposition). Brutish, laconic Forrest is the defacto leader, although youngest brother, Jack, is our entry point into the story. He’s the “new generation,” as it were, and constantly strains at the restraints that he feels are placed by his more cautious older brothers. Jack also idolizes urban gangster Floyd Banner (Gary Oldman), a flashy, tommy-gun-wielding hothead who bears more than a passing resemblance to the legendary “Pretty Boy” Floyd. Forrest, for his part, just wants life to keep going as it has been: the family has managed to carve out their own piece of happiness and success amid the turmoil of the Great Depression and Forrest will do anything to protect their way of life.

Trouble, as it often does, ends up riding into town in the person of sleazy G-man Charlie Rakes (Guy Pearce). Rakes, all ash-white complexion, plucked eyebrows and fastidious dislike of dirt and germs, is a mealy-mouthed monster and just about as far from “law and order” as a lawman can get. Together with corrupt Virgina Commonwealth Attorney, Mason Wardell (Tim Tolin), Rakes is more interested in shaking the Bondurants down and taking a cut of their profits than he is in eliminating the run of moonshine from Franklin County out to the rest of the bone-dry state. Hard-headed Forrest won’t budge, however, initiating a war between the bootleggers of Franklin County and Rakes. As the casualties build up on both sides, the polar ends of the Bondurant clan must deal with their own issues: Forrest begins a halting, tentative relationship with Maggie (Jessica Chastain), a waitress at the Bondurants’ “bar,” while Jack tries to court Bertha Minnix (Mia Wasikowska), the virginal daughter of a local fundamentalist preacher. When Forrest is ambushed and injured during a liquor delivery that Jack was supposed to back him up on, Jack decides to strike a deal with Floyd Banner, which irks Forrest and creates a division in the family. As the corrupt feds close in and their fellow bootleggers either fall in line or are outright killed, the Bondurants must make a desperate last stand to preserve their way of life. Will Forrest be able to pulverize the problem into submission or has his luck (and invincibility) finally run out?

While Lawless has moments of abject brutality that nearly rival anything in Hillcoat and Cave’s previous films (the scene where Forrest beats ten shades of red out of a pair of barroom louts with some brass knuckles manages to be both immensely horrifying and primally satisfying, while the scene where Rakes’ men tar and feather a bootlegger is just horrifying), this is a much “softer” film than either Ghosts…or The Proposition. For one thing, Hillcoat and Cave break up the brutality with the twin romance angles, which bring some delicate balance to the proceedings: while the relationship between Jack and Bertha often feels a bit silly and clichéd, there’s some genuine pathos to the tender, wounded courtship between the formerly big-city Maggie and the resolutely grim Forrest. While neither romance ever really takes center stage, they both serve as decent enough ways to break up the near constant stream of beatings (poor Jack gets wailed on at least three separate times, including once by his own brother), shootings and stabbings, along with the odd rape and tar-and-feathering here and there.

While Lawless looks absolutely gorgeous (veteran French cinematographer Benoit Delhomme provides us with some truly striking, beautiful images, as well as a really evocative way with hard shadows and dark areas), the whole film is let-down by the often out-of-place acting. Hardy, in particular, is frequently kind of awful but there isn’t a single performance in the film that feels genuine or rings true. Perhaps the award here must go Guy Pearce, however, who plays Rakes right to the cheap seats and comes up with something akin to a mustache-twirling Bond villain. LaBeouf (who can be decent-enough, given the right role) feels severely light-weight as Jack and Jason Clarke gets so little to do as “other brother” Howard that I kept wondering if most of his character arc got left on the cutting-room floor. Only Chastain (who’s always been hit-or-miss for me) acquits herself admirably as Maggie: there’s genuine pain in her performance but there’s also some steel there, too, a fighting impulse that somehow seems both more real and more feral than the one ascribed to Hardy’s character.

With more fine-tuned, realistic performances, Lawless would be a much better film, although it’s still decidedly lightweight when compared to Hillcoat and Cave’s other collaborations. There were several points during the film, not least of which during a thoroughly unnecessary closing tag, where it felt like Hillcoat lets the material get away from him and the tone had a tendency to flop violently between breezy, musical montage action scenes and moments such as the one where a character is “reverse-gutted” from tailbone to neckbone. This back-and-forth was also evident, to a much smaller degree, in The Proposition but Lawless’ tone feels less structured and more haphazard. When the film works, it works spectacularly well: the combination of the Depression-era setting, extreme violence and a rousing bluegrass-ish score never cease to get the blood-pumping. When one steps back to examine the film as a whole, however, it seems to come up a bit short. It’s a pity, really: there seems to be a really intense, gritty story locked inside but the constant overacting took me out so often that I ended up viewing events in a much more clinical manner than I would have liked. The greatest criticism that I can level against Lawless is that, for the first time, Hillcoat and Cave appear to have created something that feels disposable rather than essential. Here’s to hoping that their next partnership bears better fruit than this one.

5/26/14: If It Ain’t Yours, Don’t Touch It

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Aussie films, Australia, Australian films, bad cops, briefcase full of money, cinema, corrupt law enforcement, Craig Lahiff, David Lyons, double-crosses, Emma Booth, film noir, film reviews, films, Greg Stone, infidelity, Jason Clarke, Movies, stolen money, Swerve, Vince Colosimo, writer-director

By this point in cinematic history, you’d think that nice guys would know better than to pick up suitcases/briefcases/duffle bags that don’t belong to them. You know the scoop: nice, upstanding, morally sound dude (usually a happy married father with a couple of adorable kids) comes upon a crashed car/plane/snow mobile/yak and notices said mysterious package. Said package will usually contain either money or drugs (sometimes both), which the nice, upstanding fella will then take with him. Since packages of drugs and/or money usually aren’t left around for the general populace to find, some bad dude will, inevitably, come looking for the package. The bad dude won’t find it, of course, since the nice guy will be traipsing around with it, trying not to let whatever is in there corrupt his wholesome nature. If these guys are lucky, they’ll end up in Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan (1998), where bad things happen to good people in some very ingenious ways. If our poor schmucks aren’t lucky, however, they’ll end up in Craig Lahiff’s Swerve (2011), an Aussie who-dunnit (kind of) that manages to mash Fargo (1996) and No Country For Old Men (2007) together into a pretty uninspired ball of Wonder Bread. As always, the nice guy really should kept his hands to himself.

Colin Holland (David Lyons) is one of those aforementioned nice guys, although he missed the memo about needing a cute, spunky family. Nonetheless, Colin is traveling through the backroads of Australia when he comes upon two crashed cars: one is upside down and features a dead man in a white suit (always a giveaway, if you think about it) and a suitcase full of money, while the other one features a comely young lady (Emma Booth), shaken but, otherwise, intact. Since Colin is both nice and kind of dumb, he takes the money and gives the young lady, Jina, a ride to her place. Fair enough. Colin then decides to head to the nearest town – to the nearest bar, to be accurate – and see about getting some law enforcement involvement for the dead guy. Colin has the great fortune to find Frank (Jason Clarke), a sheriff so corrupt that you can smell it through his handshake. Colin tells him about the dead guy, gives him the money and gets an invitation to come stay at Frank’s place. On the way, Colin gets to thinking it’s a little familiar…and it is, of course, because this is just where he dropped off Jina. If you guessed that Jina is actually some kind of an android that Frank keeps around to do chores, you’re in the wrong film. If you guessed that the sultry, ultra-flirtatious femme fatale is married to the corrupt sheriff, well…you may just be too quick for this one, folks. Simmer down, over there!

As Colin gets more and more involved with Frank and Jina, he starts to uncover all kinds of unsavory realities: Jina may not be faithful! Frank may not be a true-blue cop! That money may belong to bad people! Actually, we already know that last part, since we saw the elaborate cross/double-cross in the first few minutes of the film that led to the White Suit BBQ. Any time a suitcase of money involves a bomb, a drug deal and a car crash, we can pretty safely assume its “non-taxable” income. In short order, a mild-mannered blonde gentleman shows up and proceeds to Anton Chigurh the living shit out of everybody (particularly impressive is the scene where he drops a car on a mechanic’s head: suck it, cattle gun!), all on his way to retrieve the missing money. When psycho meets psycho, however, it’s gonna be a real bloodbath…and Frank is so south of sane that he’s on the opposite pole. As if all this isn’t enough, Colin discovers that Jina may have killed her former lover, one of Frank’s deputies. Or perhaps Frank did it. Or what about Jina’s skeezy boss, Sam (Vince Colosimo), who seems to have something out for Frank? What’s a nice guy to do when everybody seems to be giving you the business? If you’re Colin, it just might be time to get the hell out of the Outback.

In most cases, Swerve is completely middle-of-the-road, a thoroughly average “mystery” that’s more average than mysterious. Truth be told, the film suffers from the exact same problem that sinks most zombie films: unless you’re doing something radically different (or drastically better than everyone else), there’s just no way to differentiate one of these from the others. Zombie films attempt to vary this up by switching up the locations, making the zombies good guys, adding elements of comedy/romance/musical/etc…whatever it takes to make one stand out from the pack. The films that don’t do this, by default, end up seeming so generic as to be factory-made: perhaps anonymous zombie pictures would have been more of a novelty in the early-mid-’70s but by this point in the 2000s, it’s all pretty much been seen/done before.

This, then, is Swerve’s biggest problem: it takes several genre tropes (the mysterious suitcase of case, the femme fatale, the crooked sheriff, the small-town with a secret, the innocent but unlucky drifter) and serves them up as-is, as fresh as stale bread. There’s no sense of invention, nothing to set this above (or below, in many ways) a hundred other similar films. Unlike other Australian crime films, the actual setting doesn’t really affect the story: it could have been the American South, the British Isles or the African veldt and it would have made the same difference. I certainly don’t expect Australian films to be awash in kangaroos and didgeridoos but there seems to be precious little Australian identity here whatsoever: the setting ends up being as generic as the rest of the film.

As a mystery, Swerve is almost a complete mess, filled with so many crosses and double-crosses that the plot takes on too many holes and sinks like a stone. By the time we get to the rather ridiculous “twist” ending, which really does come out of left field and means absolutely nothing, we’ve already had to sit through so many film noir-lite moments that it all feels arbitrary. At first, I was disappointed that I’d missed the clue’s that pointed to the “real” mastermind. This was, of course, until I realized that there were no clues: how could there be…the character in question is only in the film for about three minutes altogether and never mentioned or alluded to by anyone. It’s a Perry Mason moment (how do you know who’s guilty? Ask ’em in court and they’ll be happy to spill the beans) in that it’s just dropped into our laps, a gift from the movie gods.

Craft-wise, the film is pretty content to stick to the middle-road established by the plot: this is basic, no-frills filmmaking (with a little more editing “flair” than I usually prefer in films) with competent acting and not much else. Jason Clarke is pretty slimy as Frank but David Lyons is pretty ridiculous as Colin. Lyons plays Colin like a cross between a white knight, Colin Ferrell and Forrest Gump, blending in so many disparate elements of sweet/naive/stupid/smoldering that he ends up completely without personality: all colors combine to create the blandest white possible. Poor Emma Booth has the misfortune of channeling Tara Reid throughout the film, which did nothing for her credibility whatsoever. Jina is one of those ridiculous “sexpot” characters that really only work in very old films or very self-aware ones: Swerve is neither and just comes across as frustratingly mercurial and fickle. The blonde hitman (sorry, buddy: you were never named in the film, which may have been some sort of genius plan, on your part) is patently ridiculous, coming across like some sort of twiggy Termnator even before we get the Terminator-esque scenes where Frank takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’…and keeps on…and keeps on…and on…

As I find myself saying quite a bit, Swerve isn’t the worst film you’ll see all year: it probably won’t even be in the bottom 30. That said, there’s absolutely nothing to distinguish this in any way or to make it worth seeking out. Unless you’re on some kind of an insane quest to see every film every made (which, of course, I am), there won’t be much of a reason to slow down and give this the once-over twice. Better to spend your 90 minutes elsewhere, perhaps looking for your own mysterious suitcase out in the desert.