Risky Flicks: American Sniper

American Sniper (2014):

Dir. Clint Eastwood

Written by Jason Hall

Starring Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller

The Challenge: 

It’s an annoyance that I even have to talk about this one at all, but I guess since this is apparently some huge earth-shattering fucking deal that the whole culture lost its goddam mind over and it made piles of cash and was nominated for a raft of awards (it won only one, best sound editing) and made everyone on the internet go all gamergate all over each other, I’ve gotta step in and set you people right. So let’s get to it.

What’s the risk?

• Conservatives loved it, and they let their love be known in the most unappealing way possible: subliterate bloodthirsty tweets, a phrase so profoundly unpleasant that just by forcing me to write it, the movie has one strike against it.
• It has American in the title, the preferred go-to hustle of dull, pretentious people trying to distract from their moronic pablum by insinuating their drivel is really about something. (exceptions: AMERICAN MOVIE and AMERICAN SPLENDOR, both of which preceded the trend)
• Disease-of-the-week melodrama about PTSD and patriotism? What is this, the Lifetime network?

Possible Mitigating Factors:

• Clint? His classical, reserved and actor-focused directorial style can be dynamite when he’s working with a good script. Which is, you know, a good 30-40% of the time.
• Hello? Best sound design?

The Case:

So, the liberals called this bloodthirsty, xenophobic, dishonest, flag-waving war-justifying unapologetic Bush-era propaganda. The conservatives agreed, but said that was a good thing. To some extent it may be those things, but mostly its ambitions are more modest. It wants to be a good war movie (it mostly is) and also seems to feel obligated to be a persuasive melodrama (it mostly isn’t). Unfortunately it had the misfortune --or bad judgement-- of undertaking those goals with a story about a war which is still painfully present in people’s lives, and believing there was be no need to actually make a clear statement about that war. And that’s where the trouble started.

See, the movie is about a bull-riding, God-and-country lovin’, modern country-music listening, polo-shirt-tucked-into-jeans wearing, red blooded simple kind of man honest American American Sniper type guy, Chris Kyle, who, depending on who you ask, is either everything that is good and upright about America or a sociopathic racist murderer. Actually if you ask him, by way of his autobiography, he makes it pretty clear that he at least aspires to be the latter, with his open xenophobia (he calls the Iraqis “Savages”) and claims to shooting looters during Katrina -- but even so, screenwriter Jason Hall (minor recurring character “Devon MacLeish” in seasons 2-4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer?) disagrees, saying that he spent time with Kyle and felt his autobiography misrepresented him. An odd claim, I know, but if there’s one thing not in dispute by anyone, it’s that Kyle’s four tours in Iraq and his 255 claimed kills (160 officially confirmed) kinda messed the dude up a little. It’s not entirely inconceivable to me that, as Hall claims, the book was a bit of self-mythologizing by a bitter, unstable guy who had just returned home from a decade at war and was putting up an angry tough guy facade.  

So what’s the real truth here? The movie’s big problem --and its most interesting quirk-- is that it either doesn’t know or isn’t saying. Just like his autobiography, the movie lets Kyle tell us what he thinks --he’s in Iraq to kill the bad guys, he isn’t bothered by all the killing, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a coward or a traitor--, and then lets us judge for ourselves how much he really believes his own story and how much is just a cover for the immense psychological damage this war has done to him. Kyle gets plenty of time to offer his opinions about what he’s doing and how it’s affecting him, and the movie mostly never contradicts him. In fact, it sometimes even twists the facts a little to better fit his right-wing point-of-view, most notably when the movie cuts from Kyle’s horror over 9/11 to his serving in Iraq, as though the two were related. That obviously raised a lot of hackles among the lefties, and maybe rightly so. But of course, the movie is from Kyle’s perspective, and it’s not surprising that the connection made perfect sense to him and a lot of other people at the time. Besides, if people don’t get that those two things were not connected by now, we can hardly blame the movie for not enlightening them, that one’s on us.

Freedom, justice, the American way.

So we know what Kyle thinks, and we also know that what he thinks isn’t going to sit real well with a lot of people, myself included. The question is, what does the movie think about all this? To both its credit and its detriment, it simply refuses to say conclusively. Of course, there’s not much in the film’s style to suggest that Kyle’s somewhat warped perspective is merely the subjective interpretation of one man. The film is shot with a clear eye towards realism, not subjectivity, and moreover the movie tends to set things up to prove him right when the chips are down. Still, while there are many things here which present Kyle in a positive light, there are also some pretty noticeable details (mostly in Bradley Cooper’s macho but sad-eyed performance) that suggest that maybe there’s more going on here than Kyle is either willing or able to admit. There’s a provocative opaqueness to his character and a general layer of ambiguity about the whole enterprise; Eastwood seems to have been bound and determined to make a movie which could be seen either as a love letter to wartime jingoism gilded in passion play martyrdom, or a searing indictment of an ethos which takes people with good intentions and turns them into emotionally ruined, ideologically rigid killers. By never directly challenging Kyle’s conflation of militarism with patriotism and warfare with morality, it dares us to either accept it as correct (as, it turns out, a lot of people did) or to critique it by way of its obvious destructiveness on Kyle’s psyche. On balance, it probably leans more towards the former (little wonder, since Hall would hardly have been able to pitch a script criticizing the guy after spending so much time with him and his family and then having him, spoiler, die) but there’s just barely enough room in Cooper’s portrayal of him to allow for some doubt.

In theory, that sounds like kind of an interesting idea, but unfortunately it’s severely undermined by two important factors. The first is that it’s probably a terrible idea to try and make an ambiguous film about an issue that it’s pretty much impossible for people to not have a strong opinion about from the start. I know every single fucking asshole with some jackass opinion these days feels like what the world needs is “starting conversations,” (translation: “I’d like an opportunity to lecture you about why you’re wrong”) but honestly this is not a very good conversation starter. There’s not really much conversation to be had which hasn’t already been run into the ground over America’s painful decade and more at war, and even if there was, this movie probably doesn’t have much to contribute to it. Especially since they have sanded a lot of Kyle’s more unpleasant tendencies off in order to make it “fair and balanced” to both sides, just like reality is. I know Hall thinks he was a nicer guy than his autobiography made him out to be, but come on man, he said that stuff. Even if you don’t believe it, you gotta try and explain the character well enough that we could understand why he would make it up. I mean, I don’t think Charlie Kaufman believes that Chuck Barris was actually a superspy, but by the end of CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND we understand him well enough to get why he’d lie about a thing like that. Not so here. It’s pretty much impossible to imagine Cooper’s humble, stoic movie Kyle saying the things that real-life Kyle said in his book, regardless of the circumstances. So not only does the movie not have a lot of real insight into the war, it also doesn’t really offer much insight into this real historical person, does it?

I mean, if we’re not going to be honest about who this guy was and his own claims about what he did… what are we even talking about here? Do we really feel like we can have a meaningful conversation about this topic by sanitizing this guy’s own autobiography so he seems nicer and more reasonable? I don’t think it needs to judge him or present him as a villain, but if there really is something to be learned about this man, I don’t think we can really learn it by turning him into a sanitized, fictionalized Hollywood version. You gotta either tell it like it actually was, or you gotta just change the name and admit that you’re making up a new character to tell the story you’d rather tell. Nothing wrong with that either; I imagine the fictionalized movie Kyle probably resonates with a lot of real soldiers who really did feel more conflicted than he (claims he) did. But you can’t have both — you can’t do a character study about a real person and then change the stuff you find unappealing about them. It’s no longer an actual character study then, more like wish fulfillment.

If this view makes you feel a little uncomfortable, don't worry, this is mostly done by robots now. Whew!

And that leads us to the second problem, and one which is probably much worse for the movie itself: even if we generously assume the most interesting possible interpretation (Chris Kyle is the product of a brittle, spirit-crushing way of thinking that he’s impossibly ill-equipped to overcome, and he’s gradually crushed by it)... he’s still not a very interesting character. He’s just kind of dull and pedantic in the most broad possible way (actually, it’s frankly a little surprising that conservatives weren’t more offended by how completely the character plays into every possible stereotype about them). There may be something kind of tragic about how his iron-clad ethos prevents him from effectively dealing with the messy, complicated real world, but even at that we spend entirely too much time with him for this to be consistently engrossing. If there’s anything interesting here, it’s what he’s not saying, which is a pretty thin thread to hang an entire movie on, and never explicitly drawn out enough to be a genuine conflict.

The real Kyle seemed full of contradictions -- in reality, he praised the anti-war letter written by his colleague Mark Lee that he fumes about in the movie, even as he seems strongly in favor of the conflict; he repeatedly uses the word “savage” to describe the Iraqis in his book, but seemed to take his responsibility to protect their civilians seriously, even categorically refusing to kill children (a stance the film version of him doesn't share). Watching his interview on Conan O'Brien's show, he seems a little squirrely, even goofy, talking his way through his work with a professional’s ease, but with a little kid’s equal parts enthusiasm and embarrassment at being the center of attention. It’s a weird, somewhat awkward conversation -- Conan is trying to make light TV out of the experience of a guy who is famous for killing more people than any other sniper in history-- but it’s also sort of impossible to not find Kyle likable. He has a winning, self-effacing sort of smile, a wide, open face which veers between unselfconscious earnestness and sheepish bemusement. Even on an O’Reilly Factor clip unencouragingly titled “Navy SEAL Sniper Chris Kyle Enemy are Savages/ www.RightFace.us,“ he comes across as sincere and nuanced, which is especially interesting since the story he’s telling --punching out Jesse Ventura in a bar-- seems likely to be total fiction, and, in fact, Ventura sued him for slander and won. It’s hard to know what to make of this Kyle, but I have to say, even in these pandering talking-head TV interviews, he seems vivid and alive in a way which sad-eyed, glowering Cooper’s movie version of him never does. The real Kyle was, as we all are, a messy, tangled web of contradictions and conflicting impulses, but the movie turns him into something much more dull: a symbol, a symptom.

Lacking an ability to probe Kyle’s inner conflict, a huge chunk of this story is just the normal subplot from an action movie where a tearful wife (Sienna Miller, “the military science fiction action film G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra,” as her wikipedia page eloquently puts it) wants her husband to stop being so awesome and badass and stay home with her in placid domesticity, but he’s restless because he’s a man of action and knows that evil will prevail unless he personally stops it. This conflict is in every action movie ever made, so it’s no surprise it’s in here too. Except that instead of wasting 5 minutes of our time like a normal action movie, AMERICAN SNIPER makes it arguably the central conflict, without really adding any depth to this rather banal disagreement. Seriously, probably half the movie is two kind of shallow, uninterested characters played by terrific actors arguing about why he’s never around and it’s hard to raise kids as a single mom and it’s scary to never know if he’s gonna live or die etc etc. While obviously this is a real hardship for families of people serving abroad, the movie version of this conversation finds nothing interesting to explore that couldn’t have been covered in an obligatory 20-second montage. It just goes on an on, around and around again, without revealing anything new about the characters or resolving in any way.

Oh yeah, I should mention that the plastic babies they use in this are a little stiff and apparently it's some kind of big deal for the internet. I can't say I noticed it while watching, but yeah, looking at this image, that is one plastic baby, all right.

Fortunately, the movie isn’t a total loss because the scenes that aren’t about that are pretty good. Not in an interesting, thought provoking way, but definitely in a gripping war movie kind of way. They’re generally pretty kinetic and exciting, especially for Eastwood (who doesn’t usually go in for fancy editing and big setpieces). The military parts combine a sense of lived-in-realism (particularly the very convincing cast) with some legitimately harrowing gunfights and a healthy dose of entertaining Hollywood bullshit, right down to the black-hatted enemy sniper who provides some narrative structure as a main villain. Unlike most of the movie, these scenes seem to find the right tone -- respectful enough of reality to want to get the details right, but clearly designed to be exciting. And they are exciting; there are at least three fairly elaborate street-battle sequences, including an adrenaline-soaked sandstorm escape during the finale. Again, maybe you don’t like the idea of such a recent national tragedy being milked for entertainment, but you gotta admit that as pure cinema, these sequences work well.

In fact, if the ratio of battle scenes --or even military scenes in Iraq-- to domestic ones had been even a little higher, this one might have actually managed to overcome the obstacles stacked against it and won me over. Sadly, it was not to be. The military scenes are clearly where the film’s strengths lie, but it is stubbornly committed to its idea of itself as a weepy, repressed melodrama, and that’s where it ends up again and again, every time without any real idea of what to do with it. It's so relentless and repetitive that I'd almost be convinced that in itself is the point, if I were even a little more confident the movie has any clear point at all.

That weird sense of a film lacking in any kind of concrete conception of why it exists is heightened immeasurably by the epilogue, which features a happy ending for Kyle so exuberantly overblown and unearned that it borders on parody, and then immediately fades out to text stating that he got murdered by a disturbed ex-vet later that day, and then rolls credits! It's so stunningly poorly thought-out that it borders on the amateurish. Some other movie might find this turn of events ironic, or tragic, or infuriating -- or, it might simply find it unimportant to Kyle’s journey and not worth including. AMERICAN SNIPER, however, seems to feel it’s important enough to warrant mentioning, but not important enough to make any kind of comment about or to connect to the narrative, as apt an example as any of the film’s clunky narrative ambiguity and undercooked perspective.

The Verdict:

Well, I ended up being right that I wouldn’t much like this one, but not necessarily for the reasons I thought. I wasn’t much offended by it. I think lovers on the right and critics on the left both saw what they wanted to see; the movie might have a slight ideological bent --depending on how you want to interpret its view of the intentionally ambiguous central character-- but even if it does, there’s really not much there. And that’s the big problem: it’s a movie about a real person which doesn’t have much to say about that person, and it’s a movie about a real war which doesn’t have much to say about that war. It’s got some fiercely intense battle scenes and a clear-eyed realism about military life, but frankly it’s a little light on actual content for a 132-minute movie about a hugely controversial topic. If we weren’t living in such a toxic swamp of bitter culture-war nonsense, I can’t imagine anyone would have gotten too excited over this glum and unfocused wartime melodrama one way or another. Oh well, hopefully it’ll inspire Clint to make a better sequel focusing on the other side of the conflict like he did with FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS / LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA. I’m sure Twitter will like that a lot better.

Demolition Derpy.

The Devil Rides Out

The Devil Rides Out aka The Devil's Bride (1968)
Dir. Terence Fisher
Written by Richard Matheson
Starring Christopher Lee, Leon Green, Charles Grey

    Given his sinister beard, magical powers, intimidating bearing, shared moniker with noted Three Musketeers antagonist Cardinal Richelieu, and tendency to be Christopher Lee, you’d be well-justified in assuming that Christopher Lee is going to be a memorable villain in this late-60s Hammer production. But actually you’re getting something far more rare -- a heroic Christopher Lee turn! Lee plays Duc de Richelieu, nobleman, scholar, and all around kicker of Satanic asses as he navigates the ins and outs of saving his buddy’s soul from the machinations of Charles Grey’s (that’s right, Blofeld from DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER) devil-worshipping Warlock Mocata. That’s right, two classic Bond villains facing off over the very soul of mortal men! DEVIL RIDES OUT ain’t fucking playing around.

Lee calls this adaptation of Dennis Wheatley’s novel his very favorite Hammer film, and it’s easy to see why. While it lacks the sumptuous atmosphere that often defines their best material, it makes up for it by being absolutely stuffed with memorable action and setpieces which range from the hilarious (a “giant spider” shot in the foreground) to the genuinely spooky (a classic goatman devil actually appears to his gathered masses!). It’s sometimes a little silly, but never boring -- and when it’s working well it casts a pretty powerful spell.

Purple nylon Satanic robes? A definite evil fashion don't.

A big part of it’s power is Lee himself, who I’ve never seen exactly phone it in but who often gets stuck in little cameo parts that just call for him to prance around in a cape for a few scenes while some hooded goons bloody up a naked British chick or two. Those don’t give him much to, er, sink his teeth into, so the enthusiasm he brings to Richelieu here is invigorating. He plays the guy as a genuine badass who may also be the only one who understands the stakes in this game, and his mixture of convincing horror and fortitude do a lot to help sell us on the drama even when things start to feel a little dated. And in the tradition of CURSE OF THE CRIMSON ALTER, this one has a friend/sidekick (Leon Greene) who takes levels of British Obliviousness to new heights. He’s the kind of fellow who can watch a Satanic mass slaughter a goat, summon the devil, and chase them with knives and then say, “Well, my dear fellow, I wonder what all that was about?” For some reason this affable doofus becomes the main character for a brief period in the middle, but director Terence Fisher know we damn well didn’t hunt down a copy of this out-of-print film to watch Leon Greene find true love with some hopped-up-on Satan waif, so Lee comes back in full force for the exciting climax. And that’s when everything gets crazy and skeletons on horseback may or may not show up.

I would just like to point out that although you can almost always count on these painted 60's and 70's posters to have a super awesome image which is not even remotely close to anything that happens in the movie (see: RAW MEAT, PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES), this one is closer than you might assume. It's not 100%, but if you assume it's a montage most of this stuff actually happens in the movie! Now watch the damn thing!

Even though it’s dated and occasionally lacking in atmosphere, Lee is right, this is a strong entry. Director Fisher, it turns out, was one of the luminaries of this period in British horror, pushing boundaries of violence and sexuality, making stars of Lee and Peter Cushing, and directing some of the most memorable (and best) films of this early Hammer era, including the 1957 THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN,1958's THE HORROR OF DRACULA (the first of Hammer’s Dracula films), THE GORGON, and FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED. Fisher appears to have directed at minimum one film every year from 1948-1969, finally winding down in 1973 with the excellent FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL. With that kind of filmography, I’m guess I’m pretty much doomed to watch more of his work just by pure chance, so it’s a good thing I think the guy is pretty sharp. As for the novel, Lee was apparently a friend of novelist Dennis Wheatley, and also helped get TO THE DEVIL...A DAUGHTER made in 1976. That one is a little more disturbing and modern-feeling, but lacks the momentum and eagerness to please that makes THE DEVIL RIDES OUT so great. Honestly, there just aren’t too many horror films out there with this level of commitment to being a consistently wild ride. So when Lee says he’d love to get this one remade with modern effects and himself reprising the role of Richelieu (who in the book is a much older man)... well, consider this one ticket sold.

And it looks like Dan’s probably up for pre-ordering a ticket to the remake too, in his ABBOT AND COSTELLO AND DUC DE RICHELIEU AND WHAT THE HELL, ASH, VS ODDJOB, JAWS AND LET’S SAY LEPRECHAUN.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2012 CHECKLIST!

LOVECRAFT ADAPTATION: No.
BOOBIES: None.
> or = HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS LEVEL GORE: No significant gore. Even the sacrificial goat gets killed off-screen.
SEQUEL: No, but I would watch the shit out of the continuing adventures of Duc du Richelieu. (And it turns out I might have been able to had this one been a bigger commercial success. The studio had planned to adapt "Strange Conflict" and "Gateway to Hell" after this, but abandoned the idea.
OBSCURITY LEVEL: Very high. Obscure, now out-of-print.
MONSTERS: Goatman-devil, "giant" spider.
SATANISTS: Hell yeah!
ZOMBIES: No zombies.
VAMPIRES: Nah.
SLASHERS: None.
CURSES: Borderline, but I'm gonna say yeah.
ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A

Lawless

Lawless (2012)
Dir. John Hillcoat
Written: Nick Motherfucking Cave
Starring Shia LeBeouf, Tom Hardy, Jessica Chastain, Mia Wasikowska, Jason Clarke, Guy Pearce, and Gary Oldman.

I don’t usually write about movies which are still in the theaters, since I feel like the hundreds of thousands of trained monkeys who already write about them around that internet I keep hearing about have that subject pretty well covered. But every once in awhile a film comes along that changes you in a profound way. That teaches you to look at the world differently, to experience more deeply, to love more richly. OK this isn’t that film, but it’s a damn fine one which is about 10 times better than it’s rap and what the hell, they haven’t made a new PUMPKINHEAD sequel in awhile so I figured I’d use my valuable time to tell you that you’ve really got to see this one. It’s awesome.

And of course, you have every reason to think it would be. John Hillcoat already has made two films which are available to you, those being THE PROPOSITION (2005) and THE ROAD (2010) and those both being one of the best films of their respective years. And screenwriter and composer Nick Cave has done many things cinematic and otherwise, all of those being the best ever regardless of year. This is the guy who wrote that famous rejected script for GLADIATOR 2 where Maximus is reincarnated by Roman gods to defend people throughout history. This is a guy who has played with Shane MacGowan, fucked PJ Harvey, covered Leonard Cohen, inspired praise by Wim Wenders, starred alongside Brad Pitt, written two novels, and authored an introduction to the fucking bible. How could anything he touches not turn to badass gold? Plus you got Tom Hardy, who has been doing amazingly ballsy work on everything from BRONSON to his shirtless Sean-Connery-plays-Darth-Vader turn in THE DARK KNIGHT RISES. Plus Guy Pearce, who would have top-tier badass credentials from THE PROPOSITION alone, even if you didn’t know about MEMENTO and L.A. CONFIDENTIAL and so on. And Gary Oldman, who has notably played Sid Vicious, Dracula, Lee Harvey Oswald, Pontius Pilate and Jean Baptiste Emanuel Zorg.  That all totals up to a pretty good badass pedigree, from a purely scientific standpoint.

So I’m thinking maybe it’s that pedigree that causes it problems. Because that’s the only possible explanation I can think of for reviews like, “The center of narrative gravity is hard to locate; for whom are we rooting, and does anything really ripple outward from this nasty local fight?*” or “An inescapable sense of "so what?" sets in early with "Lawless,"** or most patronizingly, “Mr. Hardy mostly grunts, growls and ribbits, occasionally interrupting his angry bullfrog impersonation to deliver down-home bromides that make him sound like Toby Keith choking on a Cheeto.”***

It’s hard to fathom how otherwise generally sane critics could react to a film this good with that level of vitriol. In fact, only that nutball Richard Roeper seems to have gotten what the movie was going for. His review: “Bad-ass from start to finish.”

Seriously, this is one fucking badass movie. And really, that’s all there is to it. It’s a bad-ass movie made by a bunch of badasses at or near the top of their game, committing most of their formidable badass resources to making something really God Damn kick-you-in-the-gut-burn-down-your-village-defile-your-women badass. 

Still doesn't forgive TRANSFORMERS.

But for some reason, everyone wanted something different from this movie, so many critics turned to my least favorite trend in film criticism, which is criticizing a movie that doesn’t exist. They all list different specific deficiencies, but this movie that exists isn’t the one they wanted. What exactly is should have been no one can agree on, but definitely it should have been something different. They want more drama, or more scenes in the city, or more from the women, more real history, or most infuriating, more point to all the bloodshed. Everyone seems to be of the impression that because it’s an extremely violent film, it must have some noble objective to enlighten us and teach us a valuable lesson about humanity. No you jackasses, it’s just damn entertaining. Does DOG DAY AFTERNOON really have a big philosophical point to it? Does THE WILD BUNCH reach some big epiphany about our place in the world? Shit, does THE GODFATHER really have so much to teach us about the nature of evil in man? No god damn it, they’re just phenomenally made badass stories which are told by great storytellers. Now, this isn’t quite that caliber of filmmaking, but it’s in the ballpark. It’s an enormously gripping, meticulously constructed period gangster film, and that’s all it ever needed to be. It’s like when X-FILES: I WANT TO BELIEVE came out and everyone said it was horrible because there were no aliens in it. How bout actually giving the film that does exist a chance, rather than whining that it’s not the film you personally imagined?

So, having gotten that out of the way, how about the actual film, bud? Is it any good?

Sure it’s good. Let me count the ways.

What we got here is a pretty simple period gangster story based on real history and then augmented in ways which make it more enjoyable. Hardy, LeBeouf and Clarke play three brothers in prohibition-era Appalachian Franklin County, Virginia. They, like seemingly everyone else in the county (dubbed “the wettest county in the world,” also the title of the book it was based on) are ignoring prohibition completely and making a tidy profit through their expertise in moonshining. As the money piles up, a corrupt D.A. and his sadistic enforcer Deputy Rakes (Guy Pearce) move in to try and take the business for themselves, only to find that the three brothers in question don’t take kindly to being pushed around. Most of the movie consists of the ever-escalating battle between these two groups, and the ways in which the illegal alcohol trade pushes the brothers to grow (in particular youngest brother Jack, played by LeBeouf).

What are we supposed to learn from all this? Well, there might be some feasible parallels to the war on drugs, as we watch organized crime wrack bitter years of violence on this once-peaceful community. There might also be a hint of the Afghan war, with the US represented by smug, condescending outsider Rakes thinking that he can use force to change the culture of this isolated and proud region in his favor. There may even be something to take from it about the seductive nature of violence, and the way our own mythologizing about it can lead us places we can’t back away from. 

moonshine has many uses around the home.

But really, it’s just a tense, terrifically acted story of attack and reprisal, with a little period color thrown in for texture (which may well be one of those mixed metaphors you always hear about). And as such, it’s a pretty wild success. All three brothers are spectacularly good, but special praise should be reserved for Hardy as the monsyllablistic, supposedly indestructible eldest brother Forrest. He can express so much with a mere grunt that we may seriously have to take Billy Bob Thornton’s SLING BLADE crown and award it to Hardy for best non-language performance in American history (although Chewbacca still probably remains king of this category). Hardy draws Forrest as a truly unique creation -- more man of action than thinker, but perhaps not as simple as he might first appear. He’s the leader of the brothers, with an aura of quiet authority and an understated sense of both purpose and unassailable power. But he’s also a long way from infallible, as a series of miscalculations and surprises makes clear. It’s an understated performance of an oversized character, and it makes for one of the most memorable screen badasses in recent years.

But that’s Tom Hardy, you expect him to be great. But were you expecting a great performance from Shia LeBeouf as well? Well happy Rosh Hashanah kid, you got one. LeBeouf’s Jack is the heart of the movie, and his transformation from sensitive kid to merciless killer is the chief narrative thread that links the concatenation of bloodshed. It’s a really great performance because of how subtle the character shift is -- there’s not a single moment of transition, but rather a gradual slide which is never explicitly address but always mutedly apparent. Less subtle but equally successful is Guy Pearce, fearlessly taking his loathsome antagonist to heights of hateability rarely explored by less adventurous actors.

There’s a long and storied cinematic history to hateable villains intended to stoke our bloodlust, but you gotta respect someone playing a classic song with this level of perfection. Creating a truly detestable villain and transferring audience hatred into genuine cinematic catharsis is not as easy a thing to do as it might seem -- it takes careful, well-executed filmmaking of a story which is all broad strokes. Hillcoat pulls it off with such verve that it seems almost hilariously simple -- just like any well-orchestrated magic trick. In fact, I think part of the reason this film was so easy to write off is that it’s such a well-oiled machine that it never seems to be working very hard. It’s easy to miss the stunning dexterity Hillcoat shows in navigating between humor, moments of awkward humanity, hauntingly poetic visuals, and shocking bloody violence because it all feels so natural. In a lot of ways, I think LAWLESS got punished for not showing off enough. It has fantastic performances but no high-drama Oscar Clip scenes. Visual poetry to spare but only in service of the story. Sharp, well-staged action sequences but no over-the-top showstopper setpieces. A top-notch soundtrack but few scenes that overtly call attention to it. It’s interested in working as a whole, rather than showcasing how good its parts are -- which makes for a really great movie but not one which seems ostentatiously impressive.

Scars and stripes forever

Thinking about that also kind of explains everything about the lukewarm reception this thing got. Like poor EUREKA, it’s a movie they started to make as kind of a weird arty historical hybrid film, but then someone got the idea that the cast and the premise might actually make them some money. So suddenly, the name gets changed from the admittedly terrible “The Wettest County” to the completely generic “Lawless.” Horrible posters get struck up to emphasize the stars and play down everything unique and interesting about it. They do a series of character posters as if we’re going to fall in love with each character separately and demand a lucrative LAWLESS franchise with its related marketing tie-ins, product monetization, and cheapie spinoffs. They demand a running time of under two hours, add some narration to make sure no one gets lost, make sure everything has a nicely wrapped-up happy ending. None of this ruins the movie, but it’s all designed to try and lure an audience of normal people who will just find it off-putting and weird. Meanwhile, the highbrow film snobs look at the chintzy poster, the needless narration, the slightly shallower shorter cut, write withering reviews, and prevent a more adventurous audience from checking it out in the first place. And hence a perfectly excellent film with a great cast manages to alienate it’s entire audience and disappear from theaters without anyone who would actually like it ever having taken a look at it.*****

That having been said, there are a few problems here. For one, this cut does have a whiff of being trimmed down beyond what was good for it. A number of elements it introduces seem oddly truncated, most notably story threads relating to the strict German Baptist community that lives alongside our more sinful heroes and most story threads having to do with the city mobsters lead by Gary Oldman (who end up with a total of maybe four minor scenes). Neither feels exactly extraneous, but they both scream of themes which were intended to be further developed and subsequently feel noticeably unfished. Both female characters are simultaneously well-acted and underdeveloped, but you’re used to that. More troublingly, there’s a very occasional narration by LeBeouf which painfully over-explains things that are already obvious from watching. Both Hillcoat and Cave are smart enough to show us rather than tell us -- they know that this kind of storytelling shortcut is both alienating and unnecessary, and so I’m assuming it was a concession to the studio and a way to shave minutes off the runtime. But they should have put their foot down against it, because it’s about as necessary and seamless as Harrison Ford’s narration in the theatrical cut of BLADE RUNNER. I suspect there’s a longer cut out there somewhere which manages to achieve the classic status that this cut is slightly too flawed to reach, which makes it a bit frustrating.

Who thought this would make people want to go see it? It looks like a Seagal DTV flick with a festival win.

Beyond that, there’s that [LIGHT SPOILER] troublesome and unnecessary happy ending which probably sums things up a little too neatly. The happy ending, amazingly, is true to history - maybe they felt like they had to include it, but it’s the only part of the film which comes across as labored and awkward. It feels like the end of AMERICAN GRAFFITI or HARRY POTTER PART 7 PART 2 where they unnecessarily lay out a bunch of stuff that happened to the characters after the story reaches its logical conclusion, undermining the finality of that closure and presenting nothing of particular relevance anyway. What, we need to know that everyone got married? If so, all we need is a final establishing shot of the clan all together to gather all the information we need. Having LeBeouf explain who married who, what jobs they got, what tax bracket they ended up with, where they’re insured, where they buy their gingham and so on belabors what should have been a simple, quiet grace note of an ending. [END LIGHT SPOILER]

Still, none of these things is enough to really hurt the LAWLESS experience. Even if its flaws keep it from the greatness that could have been, its still pretty damn great on its own terms. There’s a rootsy cover of the Velvet Underground’ “White Light/White Heat.” A series of tooth-shattering brass-knuckle beatdowns. Guy Pearce with hair so greasy it looks like it was painted onto his head. Why get bogged down in what might have been when what we got here is a genuinely fine little gangster movie, completely unique and filled with great touches? If it’s not quite CASINO, it’s at least THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY. You can complain about it if you want, or you follow the example that Tom Hardy sets here: man up, drink some moonshine, and know when to shut up and have a good time. 

*Anthony Lane, New Yorker

**Ann Hornaday, the Washington Post

***A.O. Scott, New York Times****

**** What, you thought I didn’t know how to use actual footnotes? 

*****By the way, what kind of world do we live in where Roger Ebert gives LAWLESS and THE MASTER two-and-a-half-stars while POSSESSION and END OF WATCH get 3-and-a-half?