Chaos and Light

If it is true of moths and flames, it's much truer of humans and chaos. Where darkness gathers, people throng; where it is light they disperse and flee. Shame and guilt, carried by each of us, prefers to hide rather than to be made known, but there's more to it than that.

Finite humans constantly struggle against confusion. There's too much to make sense of, so to remain sane we hide in oblivion, erasing the boundaries to make room for paradox. Somehow we convince ourselves that the void of chaos is more interesting, more liberating, and more all-encompassing than the colors and definition of broad daylight. Somehow we believe what we can't see is deeper than what we are able to behold. Somehow, we believe chaos is more mysterious than order.

Whatever else John Hillcoat may believe, at leat he understands that such a proposition is absurd, that the light will always be more fascinating than the darkness, and that the complexity of good is sufficient to render evil meaningless. His two most recent films, The Road (2009) and Lawless (2012), ably demonstrate this.

In both films, evil is an ever-present force. It is often tangible (as in The Road, in which the physical darkness is often associated with the presence of evil), and permeates both landscapes and individuals, bending them away from what is true toward what is rotten and dead.

What is striking in Lawless particularly is the director's reluctance to show evil directly, instead intimating its presence and horror through suggestion and the withholding of detail. Evil is certainly there, and it is certainly evil, but there's no reason to dwell on it directly because, as evil, it is inherently not worth our devoted attention. By contrast, the camera lingers long on the central characters who, though lawless themselves (they're Depression-era bootleggers in Franklin County, VA), are nonetheless devoted to an ethic and character standard that has no reason to hide itself.

The film featured exquisitely fine performances all round, but of special note are the roles of the three brothers Forrest, Howard, and Jack Bondurant, played by Tom Hardy, Jason Clarke, and Shia LaBeouf respectively. Each actor endows his character with a complexity, humanity and power that could never exist in a purely evil person....as brilliantly demonstrated by Guy Pearce's role as the bad guy, a chilling individual indeed, but more chilling because he lacks so much depth.

Hillcoat doesn't pander to our desire for titillation by showing us just how bad Pearce's character (Charlie Rakes) is, instead giving us hints that get the point across, while saving the camera's gaze mostly for depictions of the horrors evil causes, as well as the constant moral quandaries with which principled people are constantly confronted.

Lawless is a good film for a number of reasons; but it's especially refreshing to find a movie that gets at least one important thing very right. Societies and cultures are always huddling around in dark places, hoping the smoke never clears. A film like Hillcoat's latest effort looms bright, just like the bootleg stills on the hillsides of Franklin County.