Locke

dvd of the week

As I was walking out of Locke, a man behind me told his wife, “That’s my worst nightmare.” I was thinking of other clichés, too: for Ivan Locke, the events in the film are a shitshow, a tsunami, his Waterloo, a perfect storm. Most American audiences know Tom Hardy, who plays Locke, for sci-fi action roles: the perfectly suited, smoldering Eames in Inception and the masked nihilist Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. They might expect Locke to be suffering in a spaceship battle or an espionage caper gone wrong. Ivan Locke, however, is not worried about the physical world ending, but rather about the destruction of his personal, familial, middle class world. And we watch him worry about it for 90 minutes while he drives to London, the only physical action coming from him answering the phone, blowing his nose and shuffling papers. Ivan Locke is as opposite from Hardy’s most famous roles as possible, but it is his most powerful and moving performance.