for the director who last gave us the godfather ii within prison walls (with 2009’s critically-lauded a prophet), expectations for a follow-up could be forgiven for being stupidly high and improbably-achievable. still, it’s surprising that jacques audiard’s rust and bone (de rouille et d’os, now screening), is able to defy its sentimental premise and deliver the uncompromisingly frank, necessarily gritty drama it does.

billed as the film’s lead, marion cotillard’s stéphanie really shares equal, if not more screentime with brutish alain [mattias schoenaerts], a security guard/trainer with a partiality to bareknucle fighting and a less-than-stellar record as a separated father of one. when stephanie, a whale trainer, loses both her legs on the job in a horrifically stylised accident, she recalls an earlier encounter with alain, legged, in a nightclub, whom she turns to for companionship, a little sex, but mostly utter lack of bullshit and pity.

far from being the intouchables without the LOLs, however, audiard dials in the heartstring-tugging to focus on his troubled leading duo; his unmissably obvious parallels between damaged bodies and damaged minds helped to a pass by a couple of excellent leading performances that almost challenge you to cry, to empathise, or to feel in any conventional way, then to ask how dare you think you were in for a soft-focussed lifetime movie of the week — to its credit.

rust and bone is unrelenting at parts, heartstoppingly caustic at others, particularly the snow-set climax. it treads difficult emotional territory. but it’s also the kind of film that’s grown on me, not insignificantly, since seeing it months and months ago.

in his latest exercise lawless, so clear does john hillcoat intend to make the general criminal entropy pervading his southern-fried virginian setting that if any of the overexplained opening prologue featuring paid-off coppers and ruthless street beatings is lost on audiences, there’s the helpful reminder that he named his film lawless. indeed, there’s little subtlety to his violent, blunt picture comprised of routine progressions and customary archetypes, and while the crime film as a genre is a tradition ever reliant on familiar appropriations, hillcoat and screenwriter nick cave’s largest fault is an apparent inability to effectively unpack the cultural milieux or masculine legacies of their set-up.

brotherhood and loyalty will be the weary buzzwords as shia lebeouf’s jack bondurant learns the value in sacking up to join his infamous siblings in their bootlegging trade, with his cowardice the only undoing to a rich familial history of fear and violence. older brother forrest will relay, in what’s clearly meant to be the pivotal takeaway, that “it’s not the violence that sets a man apart, but the distance he is willing to go”. yet on hillcoat’s route to infamy, this ‘distance’ essentially just equates to a stronger brand of violence, as a shaky line between courage and sadism leads the bondurant boys from routine jaw-slugging to gruesome castration without any real moral repercussions. indeed, this was apparently a ‘lawless’ time, but any genuine insight beyond that as to what drives this heritage is as transparent as the pricetag hanging from lebeouf’s capone coat.

one might have been quicker to let hillcoat off the hook with lawless labelled as another harmlessly bloody gangster yarn had his delivery been someway dynamic or stylish, but alas, excluding some adequately executed sequences of nametaking and scenery-chewing, it’s all bluntly ineffectual. tom hardy’s grumbling, knuckle-dusted hero is really easy to like. guy pearce’s perfumed, eyebrowless villain is really easy to hate. the key plot points of our protagonist’s ascension to outlaw are really easy to foresee. meanwhile, mia wasikowska and jessica chastain are effectively reduced to romantic wallpaper (with a lovely breast-shaped print in chastain’s case), whose involvement unfortunately neither compromises, compliments nor challenges the trajectories of cave’s central characters.

given the capacity u.s crime films have for ugly allegorical reflections of the american dream, hillcoat’s serviceable assemblage of tropes is eventually somewhat of an empty jar, with the fallacy of jack bondurant’s gangster roleplay, and forrest’s unwavering belief in his own invincibility, serving as the clearest [though perhaps unintentional?] commentaries of our ongoing fascination with the alpha criminal. the film’s coda eventually unravels the bondurant’s mythic legend [in pleasingly comic fashion] and strings up some of its own modes of masculinity in the process, but it’s an observation of male projection that feels more like a product of confusion rather than intention. the self-conscious roles and representations of lawless may indeed ring hollow by the film’s close. i just wonder whether that was actually part of the plan.

trailer here.

for every cronenbergian devotee banking on a lurid, batshit return to form following his chatty and staid period drama a dangerous method, i can imagine as many exiting david cronenberg’s cosmopolis with similar deflated exhalation to the last; a picture possibly even more talky and cerebral than the former, even whilst boasting a heftier ratio of off-kilter spins and squeamish jolts. if a dangerous method felt for most like a rather soft unpacking of the core themes of his canon, or just a bunch of old white dudes sitting round talking about them, it only really failed for me in finding a dynamic style or narrative thrust to match that central thematic discussion. this is where cosmopolis accomplishes something quite brilliant; a cold, sheeny, and disconcerting thriller that’s always equally in service of propping up its own intellectual rigor.

the inevitable meaninglessness of excess has already been heavily documented across the medium, and thus, cronenberg’s adaptation of don delillo’s offbeat capitalist satire observes the void with a greater psychological specificity; a monologuing, philosophizing slow-drive through the ego of empire that’s equal parts hilarious stylization and cold criticism. that robert pattinson’s young billionaire eric packer ‘has it all’ virtually goes without saying; a chip of characterization that extends beyond mere attainment of capital (the fact most of the picture takes place in the rear of a futuristic limo is enough of a visual indicator for that) and wires itself into the way packer speaks and thinks, with his kingdom of authority as much an intellectual spread as economic.

mapped in an episodic series of conversations (each with its own pattinson-upping cameo) to accompany the noble quest of one man trying to get a haircut, cosmopolis follows packer’s freefall initiated by way of his own financial fuck-up; one lending him a “freedom he’s never known”, but a descent no less filtered through the hubris of his historic wealth. in the film’s gripping twenty minute closing duel, paul giamatti’s towel-clad vigilante will compare packer to the mythological icarus, with the notable point of difference being the loud, flailing way that he plummets. indeed, it’s a defining observation of our subject, epitomized in the same sequence by the stigmatic symbolism of firing a pistol through his own hand, which is particularily telling of his lofty, bloated perception toward this self-imposed, distantly-public crucification.

cosmopolis is a faithful translation of delillo’s source material; dense and crackling, with so many stand-out, summating lines, to the point where individual significance ultimately finds itself lost in sheer frequency. but eventually, as with most of cronenberg’s work, the greater effect is largely sensory; the cool, blue glow of packer’s car, the sticky, dried cream in his hair, the brief splashes of violence. whether repeat viewings would allow a deeper digestion of its tangling ideas, or reveal a semi-pretentious artificiality isn’t a question i’d really be bothered with, as most of delillo’s scathing skewering of capitalist empire is right there in packer’s spiraling trajectory and cronenberg’s sharp hand for chilly atmosphere. it’s a rhetoric as rich as it is essentially empty, but given the morality, the sanity and inevitably, the bank account of our stony-faced protagonist, perhaps that’s all precisely the point.

trailer here.