Locke | Little White Lies

Locke

18 Apr 2014 / Released: 18 Apr 2014

Words by David Jenkins

Directed by Steven Knight

Starring Olivia Colman, Ruth Wilson, and Tom Hardy

A middle-aged man with a beard, wearing a grey sweater, sitting in a dimly lit car.
A middle-aged man with a beard, wearing a grey sweater, sitting in a dimly lit car.
3

Anticipation.

Starring Tom Hardy! From the director of Hummingbird...

4

Enjoyment.

Stunt cinema done right.

3

In Retrospect.

Hardy’s lead turn proves he’s currently one of the most intense and dramatically flexible performers working today.

Tom Hardy dri­ving a car for 90 min­utes equals riv­et­ing dra­ma from direc­tor Steven Knight.

Have you ever laid in bed at night, pon­der­ing what Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten would have been like if instead of actress Mania Akbari dri­ving around Tehran and address­ing the inequal­i­ties rife in mod­ern Iran­ian soci­ety, we had a griz­zled Tom Hardy doing a thick, Richard Bur­ton-style Welsh drawl and unleash­ing his pent-up ire at Irish con­crete farm­ers direct­ly down the hands-free?

Direc­tor Steven Knight’s Locke just about ful­fils its remit as a movie, thanks to a stun­ning, casu­al­ly restrained cen­tral per­for­mance from Tom Hardy as Ivan Locke, an ace build­ing site fore­man and fam­i­ly man who has to trav­el to Lon­don to attend to a sor­ry lit­tle acci­dent. A pure dia­logue piece that comes across as a clever stage play trans­posed direct­ly to the big screen, the film con­sists entire­ly of Hardy cool­ly tra­vers­ing con­ver­sa­tion strands, attempt­ing to pre­serve his crum­bling mar­riage and pre­car­i­ous job in the space of an event­ful 90-minute evening jaunt.

The dra­mat­ic jug­gling makes Locke feel like a con­cept episode of Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble, in which Hardy’s steely pro­tag­o­nist — by all accounts a good man”, who’s being severe­ly pun­ished for drop­ping the ball just this one time — goes to insane lengths to pre­serve his dig­ni­ty and self-respect at the expense of just about every­thing else in his life. In those rare moments where he hasn’t got some­one on the line, he barks obscen­i­ties at an unseen vision of his abu­sive father in the back seat, (the film’s weak­est ele­ment), sug­gest­ing that Knight couldn’t rus­tle up a more sub­tle way to flesh-out Locke’s trag­ic childhood.

Oth­er than that, the film’s con­cept doesn’t get in the way of the cen­tral war of words, which, along­side the recent Dan­ish film, A Hijack­ing, will go down as one of the bet­ter works about the psy­cho­log­i­cal nuances of elec­tron­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tion. In rela­tion to the con­crete-based strand of the sto­ry, Knight takes the oppor­tu­ni­ty to append a neat polit­i­cal dimen­sion to the machi­na­tions of the work­place, as our vir­tu­ous pro­tag­o­nist is utter­ly unruf­fled at the prospect of rop­ing in cash-in-hand immi­grant labour to fin­ish the job.

More gen­er­al­ly, Locke appears to be about the idea of diplo­ma­cy and that, to get our own way in com­plex and heat­ed debates, it’s some­times bet­ter to grab for a series of tiny wins rather than a sin­gle, gigan­tic smack-down. It’s some­thing of a mir­a­cle that Knight man­ages to pro­tract the mate­r­i­al to fea­ture length, though that’s more down to Hardy’s pow­er­house pres­ence than the rep­e­ti­tious lat­tice of lens-flared motor­way lights, the lat­ter noth­ing more than pret­ty filler. It’s strange that this is being released at the tail-end of 2014 awards sea­son, as Hardy would sure­ly have dri­ven away with a bulging boot­ful of glim­mer­ing silverwear.

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