Locke: The Evocative Act of Subtle Storytelling (Movie Analysis)
Last week I saw the movie Locke, a one-man drama starring Tom Hardy, an SUV, and a number of brilliant co-actors who we never get to see on screen, directed by Steven Knight — the man who gave us Peaky Blinders. Locke is a movie that The Guardian calls bold and evocative. I won’t deny that. But Locke to me is more an honest testament of mastery in storytelling achieved through unconventional simplicity. By the mention of simplicity, don’t be fooled by the idea of a superficial hypothesis for a storyline crammed into an hour’s worth of screen time. The simplicity here peaks through the mirror Knight holds against the everyday life of an everyday man, like you and me.
The Story: Ivan Locke(played by Tom Hardy), a stoic-looking construction site manager, starts driving to London from Birmingham the evening before he must oversee the largest concrete pour Europe has ever seen(the conflict that will set the stage for the rest of the movie). Locke risks everything he’s worked for to see the delivery of Bethan’s (Voiced by Olivia Colman) child, a woman he impregnated during a one-night-stand. The entire movie is the journey to London, taking place through a series of phone calls — decisions Locke has to make to “fix his mistake he made once”
We see Locke making Donal(voiced by Andrew Scott), his inexperienced and alcoholic colleague take over his responsibility in a short span of notice, we see him ending 15 years of marriage to his family, and we see him lose the job that overshadowed the better part of his life. Ivan Locke’s entire life unfurls before his eyes as he tries to make it to London to see Bethan’s delivery through — all for the “decisions he had to make” so he doesn’t end up like his deserter father.
Unfortunately, Peaky Blinders is the only other work of Stephen Knight that I’ve watched other than Locke. But I think I can say it with confidence that Kight’s men, who take center stage in both Peaky and Locke are never one dimensional as they themselves claim to be. It’s pretty obvious, anyone who watches the film can grasp it, everyone except Knight’s “anti-heroes”.
“ I am going mad, but I am driving” — Locke confesses at the near end of the movie, which gives us the ambiguous revelation that Knight expects us to arrive at. Is excessive control the solution that divides good and bad? A conundrum that dares the audience to open our minds to a different reality when Locke’s wife says on the call- “The difference between once and never is the difference between good and bad.
Knight has packed brilliant supporting evidence in the movie — a reason why Locke resorts to excessive control in the face of crisis. A sense of control born out of fear and guilt, he exerts with great effort despite the reluctant indignation he feels, through the theatrical monologues he has with the empty backseat which symbolizes the existence of the shadow that Locke’s absentee father has cast over his existence.
Locke’s Philosophy of Good and Evil: We live in a world where there’s an inherent need to be good. And good is the opposite of anything and everything that caused us harm. And in most cases, harm is instilled with more gravity by someone who we’d have trusted or loved the most. Both good and evil in man’s eyes are subjective and subservient. This idea of black-and-white existence shapes our beliefs and values.
This is where I think Knight created Locke to be one among all of us. Locke’s idea of good and bad is marked by his need for everything he does to be far removed from the likeness of his father, who hurt him by not being the father he needed him to be. So his father takes the form of the guilt in his conscience and eventually the true north in his moral compass.
So by definition, Locke’s idea of good is simply ‘being there’ no matter what. He must be present for the birth of the bastard child he doesn’t care for. He must be there for the concrete pour despite being fired from the job because being present and being honest is eventually being good — being not-his-father.
So, this begs a question about Locke, about all of us. Does being good mean that we understand true evil or is the idea of good simply an escape from the self-hatred we don’t want to feel? This is a conflict that every deals with every day Stephen Knight Locke is no different, as he leaves his audience hanging on the edge of their seats at the end of this psychological drama — is Ivan Locke a good person for trying to be present for Bethan? Or is he a bad person for abandoning his professional responsibilities and breaking his family, all for a woman he knew for a span of a drunken night?
Knight has a brilliant understanding human nature of prejudice yet Locke’s story reflects his confidence in his audience in the movie with caution and an open mind. He wants his audience to take the movie as a double-edged sword rather than a double-sided coin.
The movie’s brilliance, in conclusion, lies in its ability to unpack an age-old philosophical argument with elegant simplicity, yet The Guardian’s comment ‘bold and evocative’, somehow fits. This can be justified with two great elements of this movie — the unapologetic simplicity of the screenplay executed to perfection by the lead and the torchbearer of the story — Tom Hardy
The Screenplay: Locke’s writing, simply put is uninterrupted, stripped of complicated dynamics between the dialogues, camera work, music, and color composition. If anyone would pitch this on a paper, might easily be laughed at somehow Knight pulled it off. Because Knight has treated the screenplay more as a novel (felt a great deal like a Russian classic) enacted on a screen rather than a telling of a story through cinema. This is what initially drew me to the movie, threw me off guard a held me tight till the end. The characters were defined with ease, yet not devoid of layers as the dark psyche of Ivan Locke surfaces through the monologues he has with his non-existent father — it’s almost unsettling as it is relatable. The story sequence was linear and easy to understand yet progressed like a thriller as I was left a bit frustrated to not have to know whether Locke would make it to the hospital in time or not.
The subtle art of emoting is not something one would expect from an actor like Tom Hardy. This is an observation based on his previous roles Bane in Batman or Bronson (Which I absolutely love) in the self-titled movie, yet Tom Hardy pleasantly surprised me with the subtle and vulnerable emotions that he brought to the role, Ivan Locke. If one could be a bit bold and say that subterfuge of emotions through the art of subtle emoting could not have been done by anyone else other than Hardy (and maybe, Willem Dafoe?). Not to forget the brilliant voice acting by a powerful palette of actors like Olivia Coleman as Bethan, Andrew Scott as Donal, Ruth Wilson as Katarina Locke, that evocatively added the context and layers we needed to understand Locke better.
If you’re a writer, any kind of writer, then Locke is just the unexpected epiphany, a moment of inspiration, a ray of hope that you are waiting for. It’s not a must-watch, but you must watch it anyway.
