Capone (2020)

[StevePulaski]

Capone (2020)
Directed by: Josh Trank

Tom Hardy is Al Capone in Josh Trank's biopic.

Rating: ★★★

The Al Capone you see in Josh Trank's Capone isn't the one you're used to hearing nor reading about. The once notorious gangster is merely a shell of a human, essentially incapable of stringing together a coherent sentence. His zombified eyes and croaky voice show a man in his late-40s who may as well be 80, as his brain continues to wither due to neurosyphilis. No one calls him "Al" anymore, at the request of his wife, but instead he's known warmly as "Fonse." He's also incontinent, prone to soiling himself on multiple occasions, and his days are spent chainsmoking cigars (until his health demands they must be replaced by carrots) and wandering around his palatial Florida estate.

His estate might as well be a haunted house. Every room seems to hold a suppressed or forgotten memory for Capone that sneaks up on him and causes him to lose it. A strong extended sequence involves the now-decrepit Capone reliving a party at his mansion by lumbering through various rooms; one is full of people and complimented by Louie Armstrong belting out favorites, another shows a hooker who is hot to trot, and another ostensibly exists to remind Capone just how mercilessly violent his crew was in their Chicago Outfit days. However, all of that is behind him. He now lives with his wife, Mae (Linda Cardellini), who tries to settle his paranoid thoughts and behavior the best she can, but in her often welling eyes you can see she knows, deep down, her efforts are for naught.

Made unrecognizable under layers of prosthetic, makeup, and full-blown pupils that appear to extend beyond his eye-lids at times, Tom Hardy grunts and labors his way around in another performance that confirms not only his range but capabilities as an actor. He plays frightened and vulnerable convincingly, and is surrounded by recognizable character actors, such as Cardellini, in another solid role where she's sure to be overlooked, along with Matt Dillon and Gino Cafarelli as Capone's confidants who are now strangers to their former boss.

Capone comes at a crossroads point for writer/director/editor Josh Trank, who stormed on the scene back in 2012 with Chronicle, one of the most uniquely compelling found footage films since the genre's revival in the late-aughts. Trank became a hot commodity after Chronicle became a runaway hit and made him the youngest director to score a box office debut at number one since Steven Spielberg. We all know that led to Fantastic Four in 2015, a film plagued by chaos on-set, creative differences, and wretched reviews that looked to sink Trank before his once-promising career had a real chance to float. Trank has been on the interview trail as of late speaking on how writing and shooting Capone was a cathartic experience for him.

You don't have to look too deeply to see Trank's personal connection to a man who once had many affiliates and lucrative ties who has now been reduced to a shell of his former self whilst sitting in the background literally watching laymen confiscate many of his prized possessions. Frequently, Capone turns on a radio and hears serials and stories of the infamous Saint Valentine's Day Massacre and his stamp on Chicago history. Like Trank — who took a backseat for a while and watched his name smeared in headlines following his colossal Marvel failure — Capone sits back and half-consciously internalizes information about a man he no longer is nor recognizes. You can believe a part of him is dumbfounded at the thought that he managed to live that kind of a life prior to succumbing to a mentally and physically degenerative disease.

Another laudable, albeit quirky sequence involves Capone and company watching The Wizard of Oz in his private screening room. Using whatever modicum of energy he still has in him, in the middle of the picture, he eagerly leaps from his seat and sings along with the Cowardly Lion's "If I Were King of the Forest" with his raspy drawl. His moment of happiness is cut short by a power outage that leads to him explaining to Johnny (Dillon) why The Wizard of Oz is the terrific film it is. It's there you see the commanding spunk and enthusiasm Capone once possessed that aided him in climbing the ranks as one of Chicago's most respected and feared criminals. You realize somewhere, buried deep behind the unrelenting ugliness of age and illness, he's still got it in him.

Capone was born to be divisive. In terms of tackling age and guilt, it's nowhere near as sprawling nor as emblematic of its genre as Martin Scorsese's The Irishman nor is it quite as detail-oriented as Black Mass. It's cut from a cloth similar to Gus Van Sant's Last Days, a largely forgotten drama about the final days of rock-star Kurt Cobain, and its blend of impressionism and anguish loan themselves to analysis as oppose to blunt-force. There is plenty of bloodshed in Capone, if a good portion of it is up for the familiar "real or imagined" debate. One gets the sense that if Trank made this picture as a stopgap between his debut and a would-be blockbuster, perhaps his career would've embarked on a more favorable trajectory. Like Capone, Trank can't rewrite history, but at the young age of 36, there's plenty of time for a rousing comeback.

NOTE: Me and my co-hosts Joe Viso and Dominic Guanzon discussed Josh Trank's complicated yet still-forming legacy after Chronicle and Fantastic Four in my weekly web-show Sleepless with Steve:

Starring: Tom Hardy, Linda Cardellini, Matt Dillon, Al Sapienza, Kyle MacLachlan, Gino Cafarelli, and Mason Guccione. Directed by: Josh Trank.