Lawless (2012)

Lawless comes to us from 2012, directed by John Hillcoat and written by Nick Cave from Matt Bondurant's family chronicle of Prohibition-era moonshine. Three brothers in Franklin County, Virginia, move liquor through a gas station front, and a federal marshal named Rakes arrives to demand a cut of the profits. The answer is no, and the answer costs everyone. The film is handsome, cold, and violent in the way a butcher's block is violent. It has no interest in the present day, and no interest in us.

The ledger of contemporary social consciousness is, in this case, blank. The cast is white because the setting is white, and the film makes no comment on either fact. Women appear as waitresses, sweethearts, and in one instance the survivor of a brutal assault, and that assault functions as a wound that motivates a man, which is an old arrangement and not a new argument. The villain's hinted sexual strangeness is coded as menace, which if anything cuts against the current mood. There is no engagement with race, no environmental sermon, no critique of the entrepreneurial spirit. The Bondurants are small businessmen with stills in the woods, defending their margins against a corrupt regulator. If the film has a politics, it is the politics of the family firm.

The film is a genre picture that knows what it is. Hillcoat and Cave deliver brutality with a straight face and a good soundtrack, and the audience is never scolded, never instructed, never asked to examine its complicity in anything. The body count is high, the sentiment is low, and the story ends with marriage, legitimate employment, and a man drowning in a frozen lake. Some will call this empty. It is at least honest about its emptiness. Zero, and meant sincerely.