Missing the Mark With Mumbling, Violence and Pokiness

John Hillcoat’s “Lawless” is an uneven film about bootleggers in ruralVirginia during the Depression. Why uneven? Well, for starters, let’s talk accents. Five of the stars are either English or Australian —Tom Hardy as family head Forrest Bondurant; Guy Pearce as the splendidly creepy villain Charlie Rakes; Mia Wasikowska as Bertha, the shy daughter of the preacher; Jason Clarke (hard-drinking Howard Bondurant); and Gary Oldman (gangster Floyd Banner). Pearce, Wasikowska and Oldman don’t struggle with sounding appropriate to the time and place, but the solution for Clarke and especially Hardy seems to be mumbling. Subtitles would have been helpful, because Forrest, the leader of the Bondurant family, keeps saying things I was sure were critical to the plot. But these lines sounded as if he were talking with a fat lip and his mouth full of mashed potatoes. Thinking it over, though, I’m not sure clarity of speech would havehelped the plot much. See, the Bondurants are running a modest moonshining business in Franklin County — the wettest county in the world, and proud of it. They have a respectful relationship with local law enforcement and things are okay, until gangsters (Oldman et al.) and crooked pols and agents (Pearce et al.) show up. Suddenly there’s a giant fly in the sour mash. Forrest Bondurant declines to do whatever it is they want him to do. (It’s hard to tell exactly what because of the mumbling.) And that means war. Fine so far, but neither Hillcoat’s direction nor Nick Cave’s (another Aussie) screenplay spell out who’s who. Is it Banner’s men who cut Forrest’s throat? Is it the Rakes outfit? Who is this district attorney? A confusing plot can be irrelevant if the pace is quick (see HowardHawks’ “The Big Sleep” and Alfred Hitchcock’s “North By Northwest”).But “Lawless” is also endless, seemingly, with numerous detours — two amorous subplots, and half a dozen scenes of extreme, graphic violence.These last are detailed and leisurely in pace. They are far beyond the usual explosions and gunshot wounds of the average action flick. If you have a sensitive nature you will not like this stuff. At all. High points — Guy Pearce steals the show as the foppish and sadistic Rakes. Shia LaBeouf as young Jack Bondurant does a nice job as the ambitious and insecure youngest brother of the bootlegging family. And the love scene with a nekkid Jessica Chastain and the mumbling Hardy is one of the more improbable examples of its type. Also of interest — the soundtrack includes not one but two down homeversions of the Velvet Underground’s “White Light/White Heat,” redirected to corn liquor from the original topic of amphetamines. So between the mumbling and the fractured plot, the gratuitous violence and the overall pokey pace, “Lawless” misses the mark. “Lawless” is rated R. It is playing at The Moviehouse in Millerton, NY, and elsewhere.