Writer/director Josh Trank’s “Capone” is a calculating de-glamorisation one of America’s most infamous and iconic crime lords, Al Capone. In the years after his release from a decade in prison, the 47-year old Capone now spends his final days on a palatial Floridian estate, and we are drawn into the physical and psychological effects of his agonising neurosyphilitic dementia.
The preliminary critical dialogue about “Capone” focused on the distracting grotesque elements of the film and Trank’s focus on Capone’s unceremonious scatological habits – a symptom of his degrading health. While expectations may be akin to that scene in “Bridesmaids” where it’s “coming out like lava,” I can safely say that it’s not like that. As a purveyor of every masterful “Jackass” film, this film’s use of excrement is mild.
In many scenes, the camera lingers on the statues that populate the estate – high art glamours of historical figures, muses or characters (sometimes all three). The relics of his past, spoils of his kingdom repossessed. It’s a calculated misdirection, and the focal figure of Julius Caesar in a gold embossed chest plate is an essential point of examination.
We cut from them to Hardy’s dishevelled and delirious Capone staring into the swamp surrounding his estates, assessing the terrain with insect-like surveillance as we’re drawn into his unreliable (yet diagnostically accurate) perspective. Capone is introduced chasing a hoard of children through his rainy estate, disrupting thanksgiving food preparation festivities and causing a right mess.
One of the most famous scenes in Coppola’s “The Godfather” sees Brando’s titular character chasing his grandson around their garden in a moment of domestic bliss… until he unexpectedly collapses. The ends of this character and the beginnings of Capone share the same notes, but they’re arranged for inverse intent. Coppola’s restrained staging kept you at a distance – the towering figure instantly deflated but the death is peaceful, dignified. Trank’s entire film is oppositional to this dignity. From the jump, Capone’s interaction with the children is muddier, stranger and his grip on the game – in Trank and Hardy’s orchestration – is more unsettling.
Inhabiting the role of Fonse, beneath layers of make-up applied with a trowel, is the fascinating Tom Hardy. Hardy seems to be so hyper-aware of his movie star magnetism that he’s intent to identify new ways to handicap his ability to engage and connect with the audience. It’s a performance growled and muttered. The most clarity is his enunciations in Italian. This may be Hardy’s most inarticulate performance yet, and that’s saying something. His eyes are the focal point for every composition, a gravitational anchor point for you to clasp onto and be towed through the film.
Capone, even in his significantly altered state, is attempting to rewrite his history. He creates alternate characters, his mind reshaping events that changed an honourable course into one of vengeance. The characters around Capone emulate the statues that litter the estate – these living photographs never allowed to broaden beyond the two dimensional.
The actors selected are expressive “head-shots”, collector trading card versions of themselves and their characters. The big dick/teeth swagger of Matt Dillon, the dark regret of Al Sapienza, the experience and piercing awareness of Kathrine Narducci, the ‘diet Elliot Ness’ archetypal beauty of Jack Lowden, and the effortlessly corrupt Kyle MacLachlan. Each of these character actors has so little time and focus on imparting who they are in the film’s flimsy reality.
There’s a lightning bolt that occurs in one of the film’s many strange trips into the subconscious. Capone is wandering the halls of his home; each door opens a new cavern in the catacombs of his mind. This bewildered, vulnerable and half-dressed Capone interacts with the visions like he’s that towering figure in his past. Just as in Ang Lee’s deeply underrated “Hulk” when Bruce Banner (Eric Bana) looks in the mirror in a dream and sees the incredible, green beast and alter ego Hulk staring back at him.
In “Capone,” Fonse sees himself at his peak. Hardy is the strapping, youthful and menacing crime lord. It’s hard not to crave the Capone of that time, after the intentional trudging through this deranged man’s mind. The clarity and intent that reverberate through the screen seem like a relief. The youthful Capone stares at this husk he’s become with contempt. The pain and humanity of the disease-ridden Capone is caught in the lie by this vision.
If one were to watch Brian De Palma’s “The Untouchables” immediately after “Capone” – as I did – you’d be reminded of the hubris that Robert De Niro’s portrayal so gleefully inhabited. If “The Untouchables” is the pride, the American myth-making, then Trank’s ambition for “Capone” is to draw you into its unceremonious free-fall. It’s not pleasant, and it’s not trying to be. It’s a coffin nail, and Trank wants you to help him and his possessed star Tom Hardy to hammer it in hard together.
