Forrest Bondurant: The Rorschach of 1929
Sep. 20th, 2012 03:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdustThis week's gone by in a freaking cloud. I made some notes yesterday, during the headlong rush from school to psychological assessment (Dr Greenbaum thinks she's finally done enough testing to be getting on with, thank God; results will be in sometime near the end of October) to two-hour gym block and back, but haven't had time to input them as yet. And now the next ChiZine.com column is upon us, too; I've decided I'm going to write an appreciation of Michael McDowell, one of my formative influences. Today's about laying in track, so tomorrow will probably be about assembly. And in the meantime...
Lawless, as promised: I don't think it's going too far to suggest that every film Australian director John Hillcoat's made thus far has been a Western, to one degree of another (yes, even The Road—hell, it's Cormac McCarthy, ain't it?), and this is no exception. Based on a family memoir called The Wettest County in the World, it tells the probably-self-aggrandizing legend of the Bondurant brothers, three backwoods Virginia 'shine cookers and merchants, who hit a ridiculously verdant moneymaking patch during Prohibition. The eldest, Howard (Jason Clarke), is a perpetually drunken berserker who managed to emerge from World War I as the sole survivor of his battalion; the youngest, Jack (Shia LaBeouf), yearns for city slickness and pals around with literally rickety—in that he once had rickets—local weirdo-savant Cricket Pate (Dane DeHaan), hoping to stumble into gangsterhood but fearing he'll never be as tough as his elder siblings. And then there's Forrest (Tom Hardy), the brains of the bunch, a slow-moving bear of a man in a threadbare old cardigan whose vocabulary is mainly made up of various indistinct grumbles; he emerged from the Flu Pandemic as his family's main bread-winner, and what he “says” goes, mainly because he is the toughest sumbitch anyone he's ever met will ever meet.
How tough? Well, during the course of the film, Forrest is the guy who (spoiler alert) gets his throat cut ear to ear and survives mainly because he held it closed until the wound froze together, before somebody came by and drove him to the hospital. (The story told later is that he walked there, and even he believes it until given proof of it happening otherwise, because this is simply the sort of shit which constantly happens to Forrest Bondurant.) He also gets shot multiple times, does horrifying damage to people with brass knuckles and a straight razor, and turns up unexpectedly in one scene in such a way as to make everyone in the theatre laugh out loud, half from amazement, half from delight. Forrest doesn't care much about money in a personal way, living like a criminal monk (“Man sleeps on a mattress on the floor, like a damn Chink!” Jack complains, at one point), yet still manages to make the most glamourous woman any of the brothers have ever run across fall in love with him—Maggie (Jessica Chastain), a former showgirl and moll from Chicago, who shows up one day to demand a job in the Bondurants' barely functional roadhouse—without even really noticing it, remaining blithely certain he must be misconstruing her interest right up until the night she finally strips naked in front of him and tells him to shove over.
When the law descends upon Franklin County, the Bondurants are the only 'shine cookers who refuse to roll over, pretty much on principle. This brings them into direct conflict with Special Deputy Charlie Rakes (Guy Pearce), a piece of work so nasty he seems self-invented from the ground up as a demented parody of what he think a man of wealth, taste and bad-assedness should look like. Pearce's character design—I can only think he probably dictated most of it, since I've seen Priscilla, Queen of the Desert more than once—plays like Hollywood glamour on an OCD shoestring: Spats and suspenders, multiple pairs of gloves (so whenever he wrecks one with somebody's blood, he can pull out another), a part in his hair so severe it looks shaved, a patent-leather sheen to his locks which proves to be shoe-polish applied with a toothbrush, a gilded gun, and so much cologne it shows he doesn't care if people can smell him coming. “I don't much like you, Special Deputy Rakes,” the Franklin County sheriff says, after being told “You fucking hicks are a spectacle unto yourselves,” to which Rakes replies: “Yeah, well, few do.” (The other great exchange, though it doesn't end so well, is between Rakes and poor, doomed Cricket. “Your friend called me a fuckin' nance,” Rakes tells Cricket, like he can't believe anyone would have the effrontery; “Maybe it's 'cause you don't smell like everybody else,” Cricket suggests, for all the world like he's just trying to help. Which is when Rakes steers him into a clump of kudzu, and breaks his neck with his hands.)
In his review of Lawless, Roger Ebert—apparently distracted by the film's promo material, which seems to want to imply the Bondurants are “heroes” in a way that I truly don't think the movie's actual content supports—basically ends up concluding that he's not sure what to take away from this cavalcade of human-on-human nastiness, aside from “geez, people treat each other badly, especially when money's involved!” For myself, all I can offer by way of vague rebuttal is my belief that neither Hilllcoat nor Nick Cave, who wrote the screenplay, are trying to make any grand pronouncements on morality, so much, as just examining a very particular slice of Americana which never claims to be anything but one family's supper-table fable. Rakes is probably painted a monster because he's against the Bondurants, and the Bondurants are the ones telling the tale—but that said, Jack, who survived to become the book's author's great-grandfather, comes off throughout like an amazingly inefficient and selfish little prick who learns a few hard lessons under extreme pressure, but suffers far less than those around him. The Bondurants as a whole, likewise, careen through the narrative at the very height of their power, only to see it inevitably slip away as they outlive their moment; shit simply happens, jacked high with blood and 'shine, in that extremely limited human way. And it's never boring, which is what I mainly want out of a film, these days.
So there we go. Don't forget to check out my tumblr (http://handful-ofdust.tumblr.com/), because reblogging is always easier than blogging, so it gets updated a lot more often. But as this hopefully proves, I'm not going to stop blogging, either.;)
Lawless, as promised: I don't think it's going too far to suggest that every film Australian director John Hillcoat's made thus far has been a Western, to one degree of another (yes, even The Road—hell, it's Cormac McCarthy, ain't it?), and this is no exception. Based on a family memoir called The Wettest County in the World, it tells the probably-self-aggrandizing legend of the Bondurant brothers, three backwoods Virginia 'shine cookers and merchants, who hit a ridiculously verdant moneymaking patch during Prohibition. The eldest, Howard (Jason Clarke), is a perpetually drunken berserker who managed to emerge from World War I as the sole survivor of his battalion; the youngest, Jack (Shia LaBeouf), yearns for city slickness and pals around with literally rickety—in that he once had rickets—local weirdo-savant Cricket Pate (Dane DeHaan), hoping to stumble into gangsterhood but fearing he'll never be as tough as his elder siblings. And then there's Forrest (Tom Hardy), the brains of the bunch, a slow-moving bear of a man in a threadbare old cardigan whose vocabulary is mainly made up of various indistinct grumbles; he emerged from the Flu Pandemic as his family's main bread-winner, and what he “says” goes, mainly because he is the toughest sumbitch anyone he's ever met will ever meet.
How tough? Well, during the course of the film, Forrest is the guy who (spoiler alert) gets his throat cut ear to ear and survives mainly because he held it closed until the wound froze together, before somebody came by and drove him to the hospital. (The story told later is that he walked there, and even he believes it until given proof of it happening otherwise, because this is simply the sort of shit which constantly happens to Forrest Bondurant.) He also gets shot multiple times, does horrifying damage to people with brass knuckles and a straight razor, and turns up unexpectedly in one scene in such a way as to make everyone in the theatre laugh out loud, half from amazement, half from delight. Forrest doesn't care much about money in a personal way, living like a criminal monk (“Man sleeps on a mattress on the floor, like a damn Chink!” Jack complains, at one point), yet still manages to make the most glamourous woman any of the brothers have ever run across fall in love with him—Maggie (Jessica Chastain), a former showgirl and moll from Chicago, who shows up one day to demand a job in the Bondurants' barely functional roadhouse—without even really noticing it, remaining blithely certain he must be misconstruing her interest right up until the night she finally strips naked in front of him and tells him to shove over.
When the law descends upon Franklin County, the Bondurants are the only 'shine cookers who refuse to roll over, pretty much on principle. This brings them into direct conflict with Special Deputy Charlie Rakes (Guy Pearce), a piece of work so nasty he seems self-invented from the ground up as a demented parody of what he think a man of wealth, taste and bad-assedness should look like. Pearce's character design—I can only think he probably dictated most of it, since I've seen Priscilla, Queen of the Desert more than once—plays like Hollywood glamour on an OCD shoestring: Spats and suspenders, multiple pairs of gloves (so whenever he wrecks one with somebody's blood, he can pull out another), a part in his hair so severe it looks shaved, a patent-leather sheen to his locks which proves to be shoe-polish applied with a toothbrush, a gilded gun, and so much cologne it shows he doesn't care if people can smell him coming. “I don't much like you, Special Deputy Rakes,” the Franklin County sheriff says, after being told “You fucking hicks are a spectacle unto yourselves,” to which Rakes replies: “Yeah, well, few do.” (The other great exchange, though it doesn't end so well, is between Rakes and poor, doomed Cricket. “Your friend called me a fuckin' nance,” Rakes tells Cricket, like he can't believe anyone would have the effrontery; “Maybe it's 'cause you don't smell like everybody else,” Cricket suggests, for all the world like he's just trying to help. Which is when Rakes steers him into a clump of kudzu, and breaks his neck with his hands.)
In his review of Lawless, Roger Ebert—apparently distracted by the film's promo material, which seems to want to imply the Bondurants are “heroes” in a way that I truly don't think the movie's actual content supports—basically ends up concluding that he's not sure what to take away from this cavalcade of human-on-human nastiness, aside from “geez, people treat each other badly, especially when money's involved!” For myself, all I can offer by way of vague rebuttal is my belief that neither Hilllcoat nor Nick Cave, who wrote the screenplay, are trying to make any grand pronouncements on morality, so much, as just examining a very particular slice of Americana which never claims to be anything but one family's supper-table fable. Rakes is probably painted a monster because he's against the Bondurants, and the Bondurants are the ones telling the tale—but that said, Jack, who survived to become the book's author's great-grandfather, comes off throughout like an amazingly inefficient and selfish little prick who learns a few hard lessons under extreme pressure, but suffers far less than those around him. The Bondurants as a whole, likewise, careen through the narrative at the very height of their power, only to see it inevitably slip away as they outlive their moment; shit simply happens, jacked high with blood and 'shine, in that extremely limited human way. And it's never boring, which is what I mainly want out of a film, these days.
So there we go. Don't forget to check out my tumblr (http://handful-ofdust.tumblr.com/), because reblogging is always easier than blogging, so it gets updated a lot more often. But as this hopefully proves, I'm not going to stop blogging, either.;)
