Film Review: Capone
Josh Trank Shakes Up the Biopic With a Heaping of Blood and Shit
Heavy on gall and style, light on substance, Josh Trank’s Al Capone biopic attempts to shake free from genre convention, but comes up short. Focused on the last days of a fading gangster, Capone acts as a bizarre fever dream bolstered by a particularly unhinged performance from Tom Hardy, but it never quite rises above its tonal inconsistencies nor its veneer of theatricality. Minor spoilers below…
There aren’t many filmmakers out there like Josh Trank. With a career that can only be described as a rollercoaster, Trank burst onto the scene in 2012 as somewhat of a wunderkind hit-maker, directing a little found footage superhero film by the name of Chronicle. A jaunty sci-fi zinger that put Dane DeHaan on the map and the best showcase for Michael B. Jordan’s natural charisma since his stint on Friday Night Lights, Chronicle was a film that blew away all expectations - critically and commercially. Afterwards, and unsurprisingly, 20th Century Fox gave Trank the reins to a premier, big-budget superhero property: Fantastic Four. And in true rollercoaster fashion, things spiraled downhill faster than you can say, “It’s clobberin’ time.” In a notoriously troubled production rife with backstage drama, Twitter shade, and rumors of a disastrous shoot, it seemed that Trank had become persona non grata in Hollywood overnight.
Fast forward to 2020, and it seems that Trank is positioning his latest film - in the time of quarantine and COVID-19, no less - as a comeback of sorts. Capone is the type of film that makes clear it’s pulling out all the stops: with surreal dream sequences, a record number of scenes involving human feces, and a batshit performance from Tom Hardy under the craquelure of some nasty prosthetics, there’s no doubt that it’s a movie that strives to make its presence known. Chronicling the turbulent twilight of Fonzo’s life, Capone takes a page out of 2019’s “final years” biopic - Judy - if Judy was high on crack cocaine and LSD.
“With Capone, Trank clearly intends to portray the repulsive crime boss as a midcentury Ozymandias, but without an undercurrent of humanity, the narrative remains frustratingly inert.”
Set in the late 1940s aftermath of Al Capone’s eight-year prison sentence for tax evasion, Capone charts the ignoble end of a gangland titan as he grapples with his waning influence and his own mortality. Retired to his extravagant Florida estate where he spent the remainder of his days wasting away from an untreated bout of syphilis, Capone is cared for by his doting and loyal wife, Mae (Linda Cardellini). Under a mountain of prosthetics and makeup that straddle the line between and entertaining and excessive, Tom Hardy gives a performance that can be most aptly described as just that - a performance. Farting, shitting, and grumbling through an impenetrable rasp, Hardy once again embodies his vocal idiosyncrasies as the decrepit Scarface, gripped by a fever of paranoia and precaution. But even within his throes of delusion, some threats actually are real: The FBI is champing at the bit to pin a litany of crimes on the dying Capone, crimes that extend well beyond the white collar offenses that had previously put him away.
With Capone, Trank clearly intends to portray the repulsive crime boss as a midcentury Ozymandias, but without an undercurrent of humanity, the narrative remains frustratingly inert: Hardy’s Capone is portrayed without a shred of decency - a repugnant caricature in search of deeper substance. With nary a flashback to the aging mafioso’s prime, there’s something impressive about the structure of Capone, but this Al Capone is barely deserving of pity, let alone sympathy. Even cinema’s greatest monsters benefit from a modicum of shading, but Trank’s script leaves such characterizations behind in favor of the shocking and surreal; ugly acts of dream violence and random fits of pants-shitting can only take a film so far before getting stale.
Capone makes for a fascinating watch, if only for another round with a wild Tom Hardy performance. Hardy might have been born to play this bloated paradox of a dying crime legend, but Josh Trank’s gangster swan song is barely able to rise above its own artifice and ambitions to do something different. Just like the real-life Scarface’s missing millions that were never found, Capone’s humanity evaporates into the aether, a palpable omission that leaves the film just as soulless as its husk of a subject.
