Locke

2013 drama

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A guy drives and talks on the phone. Hands-free though. So back off, Christians! It's actually where Lincoln got the idea for those car commercials where Matthew McConaughey talks to himself.

Seriously, that's all that this is. A guy, the titular guy played by Tom Hardy, drives and talks on the phone. It's night time. There's music, but it's nothing more than wallpaper. Or upholstery, I guess. And you're just trapped in the car with this guy and his problems. And he has problems, all emanating from a one-time affair with a lonely woman that resulted in a pregnancy. He talks to an imaginary father in the backseat; that's the closest thing we have to a second physical character in this. He talks to co-workers on the eve of the biggest concrete pouring job in European history (or something like that). He talks to his sons about soccer and his wife about his mistake. And Hardy handles it all with this grace under pressure. It's such a quietly terrific performance. There's no bombast at all, but you can almost see the stress and the guilt oozing from him. It takes a special kind of performance to carry a movie with no other on-screen characters, and Hardy delivers just that performance. And it takes a special kind of screenplay to create a narrative the way this single-setting movie does--through snippets and pieces, unseen flashbacks, effects with yet-to-be-revealed causes. It's drama that sneaks up on you in a way that enhances the character and really makes you care about him, one that unfolds just how director Steven Knight wants it to unfold which is not quite like any other movie I can remember seeing. I've been trying to dig into my rudimentary understand of philosophy--my brother could tell you that I had a great Intro to Philosophy instructor at I.S.U.--to figure out if there's any reason why Hardy's character is named Locke. That's the tabula rosa guy, and Locke's concept of the self does have some connections to this Locke's story. His consequences are, at least in part, chosen by him because of his experiences as a child, so there might be some connection there. It doesn't really matter because this movie's really all about how one man is forced to man-up and deal with the Right Now.

I think I should watch every movie that Tom Hardy has been in. He's that good.