Hitchcock Would be Proud
by Andrew Collins
Locke is the story of one man’s hour-long drive through hell. From the first frame to the last, the camera shows us only Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy) in his car as he drives to London, trying to uncross the stars suddenly aligned against him. As a construction contractor, Locke has the biggest concrete pour of his career the next morning. As a father, he has a wife and two sons at home waiting to watch the biggest football match of the year with him. And as an adulterer, he has a lonely 43-year-old woman that he barely knows preparing to give birth to his child two months early. His family and coworkers know nothing about this woman and her child.
All these people are furious with him, or demand his greatest attention, and none of them understand the full situation. In the face of the most difficult hour of his life, Locke performs with aplomb, attempting to play the part of father, craftsman, manager, and son. He is more patient, calm, and reasonable than his wife, coworkers, or children, even though each of them is only experiencing a fragment of his stress. He speaks with cool resignation for the fact that no one he talks to over the next hour is going to like a single word he has to say.
Stylistically, the film is a brilliant study of a solitary man’s most trying moments. Much like a good novel or short story, it engages our emotions by forcing our imaginations to fill in the visual gaps of the characters on the other side of the phone. Hitchcock would be proud. Locke shows that good stories can be told on the big screen even with a very short credit roll.
Solitary nighttime drives, with their ethereal, dreamlike atmosphere, stir up strange thoughts and meditations. For Locke, the disappointment of the people on the other end of his calls shatters this with the angry voices of reality. Yet in the quiet moments between calls he communes with his deceased father, looking at him in the empty back seat through his rearview mirror. Here we find the true motivations of his heart. He doesn’t act out of love. Perhaps one could say he acts out of duty. But what really drives him is self-vindication. He wants to be better than his cowardly wretch of a father, who was absent at his birth and never appeared in his life until many years later.
“The Lockes were a long line of s***,” he says to his father, “but I straightened the name out.”
“You take things in your own hands, and you push against it, and you push against it until it is standing upright,” he says later. “And you stick to the plan.”
Had he behaved like his father, Locke could have had everything one could ask for – a family that loves him, professional accomplishments (the largest-ever non-military or nuclear concrete pour in Europe), but instead he chooses to own up to his mistakes.
“There is someone coming into the world,” he says, “and it’s my fault.”
Conviction like his is found in few men these days. To most, mistakes like his would seem relatively minor. What is one night of adultery over 15 years of an otherwise faithful marriage? What is one abandoned job over the course of an otherwise impeccable 10-year career? Potential excuses abound, but Locke doesn’t use them. He tells the truth, forthrightly and as much as he is able, given the circumstances.
“I will do what needs to be done,” Locke tells his father, “even if they hate me.”
Here we find the beauty of the story. Locke never loses sight of the new life for which he bears responsibility. He never deviates from the course, even though it costs him everything.
