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Colin Carman

~ Jane Austen Scholar & Culture Vulture

Colin Carman

Tag Archives: tom hardy

Review: “Lawless”

30 Thursday Aug 2012

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

benoit delhomme, bootlegging, chicago, dane dehaan, gary oldman, guy pearce, jason clarke, jessica chastain, lawless, lucinda williams, mia wasikowka, prohibition, shia labeouf, tom hardy

“Flawless?”

Grade: C+/B- (RENT IT)

A FAMILY THAT bootlegs together stays together, right?  At least that was the motto of the Bondurant brothers, a feisty frat servin’ up moonshine in Franklin County, Virginia, and the centerpiece of John Hillcoat’s new crime drama “Lawless.”  Benoit Delhomme’s camerawork, pitched to a dusty brown, and the twang of Lucinda Williams, effectively transport us to those dusty days of the Depression.  The year is 1931 and the major players are the hard-bitten Forrest (Tom Hardy), war veteran Howard (Jason Clarke) and baby brother Jack (a beefed-up Shia LaBeouf).  With the help of Cricket, their disabled friend played by Dane DeHaan, the Bondurants operate a successful watering hole in the back hills of Apalachia.

Jack has his eye on Bertha (Mia Wasikowska), a preacher’s daughter just dying for a ride in his flashy convertible and the intoxications of Jack’s outlaw image.  The spectacular but sidelined Jessica Chastain (“The Help,” “Take Shelter”) plays Maggie “Red” Beauford, a former dancer turned barmaid who helps the brothers sling their white lightning.   They all maintain amicable connections with the authorities of Franklin who look the other way while taking a few sips themselves.

That is until Chicago lawman Charlie Rakes (an eyebrow-less Guy Pearce) arrives on the scene to demolish the boys’ American pastoral and false sense of invincibility.  Who kicks a man when he’s down?  Special Deputy Rakes does and viciously so.  The locals murmur that Rakes wears perfume and as he gores Jack across his own backyard, he worries that he’ll bloody his crisp pinstripe suit and swimming cap of pomaded hair.  Jack recovers, tensions mount, and during a first date gone terribly wrong, Bertha happily trades in her head scarf and church-going clothes for the yellow, strawberry-patterned dress Jack has brought her.  All around them, meanwhile, Rakes and his corrupt cronies are bearing down.

The consummate charmer, LaBeouf is known for his effortless chemistry with female costars and though he (and costar Hardy) are in desperate need of dialect coaching, “Lawless” broadens both actors’ likability.  More so than the chirpy LaBeouf, Hardy croaks his lines as he did as the dog-muzzled Bane in “The Dark Knight Rises.”  His dialect coach had to have been a bullfrog with a double tracheotomy.  More problematic than the performances, the script is from Australian rocker Nick Cave, known for his violently balladry, and based on “The Wettest County in the World” by the Bondurant brothers’ descendant, Matt Bondurant.

“Lawless” is a scrambled egg of a script.  One particular sequence, which move from Forrest’s throat being cut in the dirt, an offscreen sexual assault on Maggie, to the aftermath of both these horrors, is as disjointed as the surrounding scenes.  Gary Oldman, as Floyd Banner, even shows his villainish face, but he remains, puzzlingly so, on the margins of the Cave’s plotline.  Pearce’s Rakes is more than enough villain to go around, but the role written for him is a despicable cliché: a sadistic fop who, aside from hating to be called out for his effeminacy, has no real motivation.  You half expect him to victimize Cricket in other ways when he finally gets his manicured hands on him in the woods, and the punishment he has coming to him by the vengeful Bondurants, is both predictable and lacking in dramatic purpose.   The bloody fate that Deputy Rakes faces should have been staged in a more intimate fashion with dialogue rather than just bullets exchanged.

Thus “Lawless” ends with another familiar feeling:  Chicago, it’s a hell of a town.

Review: “This Means War”

18 Saturday Feb 2012

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

angela bassett, bromance, chelsea handler, chris pine, mcg, reese witherspoon, romantic comedy, simon kinberg, the new york times, til schweiger, timothy dowling, tom hardy

“Bizarre Love Triangle”

Grade: F (SKIP IT)

A HEAPING PILE of celluloid excrement, “This Means War” is the first bonafide bust of a film released in 2012.  Reese Witherspoon walks the line as Lauren, the object of affection for not one but two undercover CIA agents, played by Chris Pine (“Unstoppable”) and Tom Hardy (“Warrior”).  Numbly named FDR Foster and Tuck, the men are in Hong Kong and on the hunt for a criminal named Heinrich (Til Schweiger).  When they botch the mission, their boss (played by Angela Bassett) demotes the two to desk duty.   Enter Witherspoon as Lauren, a product testing exec who, prompted by friend Trish (Chelsea Handler playing Chelsea Handler), joins a dating website and meets Tuck and later, FDR.  When the men realize they’re dating the same woman after showing each other Lauren’s picture on their laptops, they make a gentleman’s agreement and begin the love-game: may the best man win.  From there, the forgettable plotline involves tranquilizer darts, romantic pizza dinners, and one image that aptly mirrors the film itself: a car going off an unfinished bridge.

“This Means War” is directed by the mononymous McG (“Charlie’s Angels”) from a script by Timothy Dowling and Simon Kinberg, the latter of whom wrote “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” and has basically retooled that earlier script about special agents on the down-low.  And speaking of the down-low, the most remarkable thing about this unremarkable romantic comedy is the length to which FDR and Tuck go to get the girl in a film where the real love story is a bromance between two very undercover agents.  (The same could be said of Lauren’s closeness to Trish insofar as the film’s strongest bonds are same-sex.) The fact that the men plant bugs and hidden cameras in Lauren’s home to spy on her – or could it be each other? – isn’t just creepy and unfunny but deeply homosocial.

Film critic Manohla Dargis of The New York Times writes that when “the men’s rivalry soon escalates into a spy versus spy shenanigans […] you’re watching a cuddly stalker flick,” but an even more astute angle on “This Means War” can be found in the work of Gayle Rubin who, as queer theorist Eve Sedgwick once wrote, argued that “patriarchal heterosexuality can best be discussed in terms of one or another form of the traffic in women: it is the use of women as exchangeable, perhaps symbolic, property for the primary purpose of cementing the bonds of men with men.”  This means that the most curious scenes are those between FDR and Tuck and that, when Lauren enters, it’s not so much war but a bore.

The Times’ Dargis also believes Witherspoon to be miscast, writing: “She’s too calculating and self-contained a presence for most romances.”  What do you think: is Witherspoon too feisty for such light fare?

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