LAWLESS (MA) is a prohibition era crime saga of bootlegging, throat cutting, moon shining, and gun shooting from the team that had the temerity to transfer the Western to outback Australia.

Sure we had sly grog and illegal stills seconded by the six o’clock swill and proscribed Sunday trading but not the punishing Prohibition laws that created a crime kingdom and culture that generated organised crime and created, for all intents and purposes, the modern gangster. So helmer John Hillcoat and his cohorts have set and shot their gory story of grog, greed, gangsters and G men in the cradle of its conception.

Based on a family memoir by Matt Bondurant, The Wettest Country in the World, (a pun on their produce rather an accurate climatological title) LAWLESS tells the tale of three brothers, In the mountains of Franklin County, Virginia, the Bondurant brothers. The eldest, Howard (Jason Clarke), managed to survive the carnage of the Great War, but he returned home unmoored by what he had seen and done. He’s a bugger for the booze they brew. His brother Forrest (Tom Hardy) nearly died from the Spanish Flu that took his parents. He beat back death with a quiet strength and ferocious, visceral invincibility that came to define him. Jack (Shia LaBeouf) is the youngest sibling, impressionable, irresponsible, sensitive, sartorially splendid.
In these here parts, these booze brothers are liquor legends, entrepreneurs of the piss, distillery royalty, purveyors and providores of high octane hooch.

Into their enterprise paradise comes creepy, corrupt copper, Charlie Rakes, a chilling, sinister portrayal of psychopathology by Guy Pearce, a sort of prototype Joker, a deadly dandy hell bent on burying the brothers.

Nick Cave’s screenplay, like his script for The Proposition, shows a preoccupation with siblings mixed with a mastery of genre. It’s visceral and violent, laced with a laconic humour and rolls like a badlands ballad

As well as Jason Clarke and Guy Pearce, the picture is peppered with performances from other Australian thesps like Mia Wasikowska, and Noah Taylor.

Mia plays Jack’s love interest, a bible belt babe attracted by the baby bootlegger’s blarney and brio. Taylor plays a hick henchman to Gary Oldman’s flamboyant Floyd Banner, head honcho in a Chicago syndicate. Oldman’s dapper manner as a Tommy toting anti-tea totalitarian is one of the many pleasures proffered in a picture that packs punch in style and substance.

© Richard Cotter

11th October, 2012

Tags: Sydney Movie Reviews- LAWLESS, Nick Cave, Guy Pearce, Sydney Arts Guide, Richard Cotter