Lawless Heart

by Shari L. Rosenblum

Lawless Heart, a small, quiet film with much charm and some wit, is the sort of film that takes the viewer by surprise. It opens softly, with a funeral, unfolds naturally, unhurried but never slow, and eases you into a comfortable, if not easy, flow of character and circumstance. When the end comes, it feels as if it comes too soon.

A talky sort of movie without cataclysmic event or portentous moment, without pretense of profundity, Lawless Heart touches on big topics: love and death. How the death of someone beloved, someone important, someone integrated into our very sense of selves, shatters our complacency. How loss awakens our needs, tweaks our comfort zones, makes us ache for things we didn't even know we wanted. How the heart will risk cliché to shake off the laws of reason, and reason in ways that reason itself cannot grasp. And how money, ever powerful, directs, but does not determine where that reasonless reason will take us.

Lawless Heart tells three stories that all begin with and center on the death of a man we never meet, except in silent home movies. Stuart, successful restaurateur and beloved brother, cousin and lover, has drowned. Dan (Bill Nighy), Nick (Tom Hollander), and Tim (Douglas Henshall), each separately and distinctly connected to Stuart, come to bid their ritual farewells. Simultaneously, but disconnectedly, each finds himself changed by the funeral, from the moment of the funeral, and changing in ways both dramatic and imperceptible. The film, cowritten and codirected by Neil Hunter and Tom Hunsinger, gives each of their stories its own space. It unravels the narrative threads each from the other, so that we may better understand how they interweave, forcing them apart so that we can understand their detail before they spring back together.

Dan the heart-heavy cash-poor farmer husband of Stuart's sister Judy (Ellie Haddington), with whom he has a somber, if committed relationship, finds himself lightened at Stuart's funeral, in spite of himself, in flirtation with the airy florist, Corrine (Clémentine Célarié) while his wife cries in the ladies room. He spends much of the rest of the film trying to avoid Corinne and other equally uncomfortable moments of lightness, or trying to figure out how not to long for them. In this tightrope walk between slapstick and sobriety, Nighy's performance is perfectly modulated, evoking from the audience more of an indulgent smile than a derisive mockery.

Nick, the left lover, marginalized in this small Essex community as much for his reservedness as for his difference, varying as much from his own norm at the funeral as Dan in his flirtation, hears himself offer his now spare room to the boisterous Tim, just returned from years away in Europe. This uncharacteristic openness leads him to risk the inheritance of Stuart's savings, by law resting with Dan and Judy and their ailing farm, and to risk his identity in an oddly engaging escape into intimacy with a quirky woman (Sukie Smith as Charlie) he finds sleeping in his bed after one of Tim's parties. Hollander plays Nick with a soft and fragile sort of sharpness, a gentle self-assuredness bordering on arrogance, keeping the character sympathetic, but believable. Mournful, but not wearisome or dull.

Tim, the cousin and party-pal, comes from the funeral to discover the softer side of himself. The least sympathetic of the three, he becomes the most vulnerable, the most heartbreaking, looking for dalliance with the beautiful and classy Leah (Josephine Butler), and finding only true love. Henshall makes the transitions of character flawlessly, becoming not only more likable, but more attractive in the process.

By the time the third story is told, they have all come together, enriching the big picture by the detail and moving us, repeatedly, unexpectedly. What we find after three beginnings and a fade, is not a truer image of the stories told because they're told together, but a deeper understanding of each one independently because of its place in the mix.

Variously called "prismatic" and "Rashomonic," Lawless Heart is neither. It is, instead, about the paradoxical ways in which we are all alone and interconnected at the same time. This is nowhere more palpable than in the film's final scene, a scene within a scene, where we come to understand that we have come to understand the subtleties of each man's private response to the single image on the screen we are watching the characters watch.

It is a masterful resolution without resolve.

©2003 Shari L. Rosenblum
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