Then there are some events that belong more to the realm of family lore, rumor, or even myth. It is hard to say what was on my grandfather's year-old mind, and it is even more difficult to try to portray the frightening old man I knew as young, earnest, and in love with my grandmother Bertha.
Their courtship is reproduced to great effect in Lawless , with Mia Wasikowska playing the character based on my grandmother. I do know that he was a charismatic young man with an entrepreneurial spirit, who valued his brothers but who also sought his fair share of glory. In retrospect, I think that in writing this book I was trying to make up for lost time.
I think of the missed opportunities, the chances I had to talk to my grandfather, and I get angry and filled with regret. This story, this doorway to the past was right there in front of me, waiting. I was young and afraid. I won't make that mistake again. Matt Bondurant's most recent novel is The Night Swimmer.
Newsweek magazine delivered to your door Unlimited access to Newsweek. Cave famously works 9am to 5pm daily in his basement office.
I'm in this strange position right now insofar as I have to decide whether I continue working only with John, which I really enjoy doing, or make a leap into being a screenwriter for hire. I'm not sure that's where I want to go. It seems like a step too far into that world. I can see myself suddenly waking up one morning and asking myself, 'What the fuck am I doing this for?
Cave has already dubbed Lawless a "wangster" movie, a rather unfortunate label for a film that deftly merges the tropes of the urban gangster and the rural western with considerable style. With nods to Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde and Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch , it stars Tom Hardy as the leader of the three Bondurant brothers, backwoods bootleggers who battle the law and anyone else who crosses their path in Prohibition-era Virginia.
Gary Oldman shines as Floyd Banner, a city gangster whose criminal empire is spreading inexorably into Franklin County, where the Bondurants are revered as local legends, but it is the arrival of a malevolent marshal, Charlie Rakes, played by Guy Pearce, that ignites the war of attrition that escalates throughout the film's long narrative arc.
Lawless also merges the lyrical and the ultra-violent, with a pair of protracted romances providing welcome light relief from the often bloody set-pieces. Paradoxically, in a film full of extravagant male acting, it is Jessica Chastain as the sexy, but haunted, Maggie, and the brilliant Mia Wasikowska as the innocent, but mischievous, Bertha, that command most attention with their understated performances.
Revenge is the driving force of the story and the world the brothers inhabit often seems as brutal and unforgiving as a certain kind of broodingly melodramatic Nick Cave song — The Mercy Seat, say, or Your Funeral… My Trial. The film is based on The Wettest County in the World , subsequently republished as Lawless , a historical novel by Matt Bondurant, a grandson of Jack, the youngest brother, who is played by Shia LaBeouf.
In the book, you get lulled by the beautiful lyricism of the writing, then suddenly you are slapped in the face by a graphic description of a killing.
I tried to be true to that as much as I could. The film, like the book, plays with the mythology of the seemingly invincible outlaw, in this instance Forrest Bondurant, the middle brother, who, as the violence around him escalates, somehow survives against the odds to fight again. Hardy plays Forrest as a kind of taciturn patriarch, all grunts and sighs and very few words, someone who is passive in all respects apart from one — his capacity for brutal vengeance.
I was totally impressed by his unique way of thinking. At one point, he said to me: 'I just want to play it like an old lesbian. He saw the role as being essentially maternal, so when Maggie [Jessica Chastain] comes in, there's a tension in the family.
It was a lesson for me in how far an actor can go in interpreting a role. Pearce, another Australian, also ups the ante with his portrayal of special agent Rakes, a city cop with some simmering psychosexual issues that predictably manifest themselves in moments of sadistic violence.
In the novel, Rakes is a redneck country cop. Where did all the other baggage come from? And sure, we know that no one is actually invincible.
But he lived in a time where people were desperate for super figures and larger than life characters. It was a very rich period for film. You have to understand, in my family, at least with my older relatives, Jack, Howard, and Forrest were not topics of conversation in this light.
So to hear about their bootlegging for the first time was a life-changing experience.
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