Six years ago the musician Nick Cave and the director John Hillcoat made the visually striking, ultra-violent outback western, The Proposition, a return to the glory days of Australian cinema.
Their new film, similarly celebrating an intransigently independent, anti-social clan engaged in a fight with oppressive authorities, is less coherent and persuasive. The setting is now the backwoods of Virginia in 1931, the last days of prohibition, where a corrupt new law enforcement officer, the sadistic dandy Charles Rakes (Guy Pearce), arrives to shake down the real-life Bondurant family, the county's leading redneck moonshiners led by tough, tight-lipped Tom Hardy and his mild younger brother (Shia LaBeouf). More than a little indebted to Bonnie and Clyde, it's a slow, painterly movie with sudden, sustained outbursts of violence. Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us and John Sayles's Matewan are much better and more authoritative in their treatment of crime and social conflict in this particular milieu in the 1920s and 30s. But Jessica Chastain gives depth and strength to the role of a tough broad from Chicago hired to run the diner that provides a front for the Bondurants' business. She brings to mind Patricia Neal in Hud.
