Capone (2020)

 Score: 3 / 5

It was only a matter of time before Tom Hardy tackled Scarface as only he can. With his famous penchant for Method acting, he dives directly into the title role of Capone with characteristically balls-out gusto. True to form, he works unexpected magic in this movie partly due to its focus: we're in the final year of Al Capone's life, the opening text tells us. Hardy peers out from layers of makeup and prosthetics with his piercing eyes, playing the prematurely dying Fonz with the audacity and theatricality we would expect from his old-school style and his larger-than-life character. And it makes for a dazzling, rapturous performance. Hardy belongs to the rare class of actor -- like Marlon Brando or Orson Welles -- who delivers to the beat of his own drum, filtered through his own internal logic, often inaccessible and opaque. It's powerful to behold, but only works in the right context.

Hardy here rots away before us, disguised by the mask he wears and his typically arresting voice. Often unintelligible, he gurgles and grunts his way through this movie, intermittently spitting out imprecise and incorrectly pronounced Italian phrases. Be sure to watch this one with subtitles! It's calculated and chameleonic, to be sure, but this is a far cry from the technical genius of Meryl Streep and Gary Oldman; here it often feels as though Hardy's voice has been wrung through a strainer, filtered through a synthesizer, and then boiled in its own bile. As the necrotic gangster dwindles, the skin peeling off his pallid face and bodily fluids excreting themselves from his shorts, we become increasingly aware of the syphilitic fever raging in his brain. He's far from the fearsome legend he was, but when he handles a gun we see glimpses of his former horror. Most of the movie, however, comprises Hardy chewing an oversized cigar, puffing clouds of smoke, and muttering to himself as he wanders through his Florida mansion. In fact, that's about the length and breadth of whatever plot exists here.

Writer and director Josh Trank (Chronicle, Fantastic Four), despite dubious conventional measurements of "success," will never be less than an original filmmaker. In Capone, he works significant magic that cannot be overlooked, both in his remarkable skills as an old-school filmmaker and in his ability to wrangle meaning and emotional intelligence from Hardy's performance. It can't have been easy to plan this movie around Hardy's antics, but in fact Trank's mastery over the proceedings suggests that this movie was so carefully planned out it might actually be too controlled. Scenes are so choreographed, so beautifully shot (by cinematographer Peter Deming) with unexpected light and movement, so synchronous with sound and performance, and so deliberately cut and juxtaposed with other images or movements that I suspect Trank took Hardy's Brando/Welles inspiration and ran with it. He's not setting up cameras all around and splicing together "good" moments caught at random; he's dancing with his own Black Swan. Along those lines, he ends the film with an amazing sequence in which his storytelling matches the audacious theatricality of his star, erasing the line between reality and fantasy, history and character. I'm guessing that, apart from harnessing the power of Hardy, this sequence is the reason Trank made this movie.

I don't want to take away from the fascinating performance or direction here, but it is worth including that I don't expect to watch this movie again. Challenging and even, arguably, beautiful as it is, it is far from entertaining and less than engaging. Capone never tries to explain, rationalize, defend, or even explore its antihero's past, a decision I fully support. But it also never tries to dramatize anything resembling, well, dramatic. It's 103 minutes of watching a man die, a man who tries to reflect on his life but can't make connections due to his neurosyphilis; a man who still treats his family (specifically Linda Cardellini) and friends (including Matt Dillon) as though he's the pinstriped kingpin who could kill them with a flick of his finger; a man who shits his bed and plays hide-and-seek with ghostly visions in his five-star haunted house. I don't mind a tragedy, or even a bleak exercise in nihilism, but it's difficult to much care for Scarface in any capacity, especially as he's dying with so much suffering.