The Wettest Country In The World is one of the hottest projects in Hollywood right now. The Weinstein Company is likely going to win the rights for distribution to John Hillcoat‘s Prohibition era crime-drama and with a cast that includes Tom Hardy, Shia LaBoeuf, Jason Clarke, Jessica Chastain, Mia Wasikowska, Dane DeHaan, Guy Pearce and Gary Oldman, I’m not sure how you can go wrong with this one.
It has Oscar written all over it and for me personally, this is high on my list of most anticipated. Plus with John Hillcoat behind the camera, expect the film to be gritty and visceral. I’m expecting something similar to Hillcoat’s fantastic 2005 film, The Proposition, which starred Guy Pearce and shares the same screenwriter as The Wettest Country In The World, Nick Cave. Simply put, all signs point to fantastic for this project, wouldn’t you say?
In 1928, a pair of thieves accost Bondurant’s real life great-uncle Forrest at his Franklin County, Va., restaurant. They’re after a large cache of bootlegging money and end up cutting Forrest’s throat. The story of his survival and his trek to a hospital 12 miles away has taken on mythical proportions by the time Sherwood Anderson arrives in Franklin County in 1934 to research a magazine piece on the area’s prolific moonshiners. Soon after Anderson’s arrival, two anonymous men appear at the same hospital, one with legs meticulously shattered from ankle to hip, the other one castrated, with the by-products of the deed deposited in a jar of moonshine. The arc of the story lies between the attack on Forrest and that on the two men.