Capone

A pal­lid, moul­der­ing, alto­geth­er Orlokian ver­sion of Al Capone stag­gers across his pala­tial Florid­i­an com­pound in lit­tle more than a bathrobe, both his adult dia­per and sol­id gold tom­my gun ful­ly loaded. With a car­rot clenched in his per­ma-snarl (all the cig­ars were exac­er­bat­ing the syphilis that has melt­ed his brain into a thin bisque), he opens fire on his scram­bling, ter­ri­fied groundskeep­ers. He does not know where he is or what’s going on; we don’t know if this is real or just anoth­er fig­ment of his con­fused psyche.

Everyone’s fog­gy on con­text, but the moment plays best with­out it. Brief snatch­es of ham­my tran­scen­dence such as this have been swad­dled in a film that can­not hope to keep up with them. The odd ends stick­ing out of Josh Trank’s biopic focused on the infa­mous gangster’s twi­light years – the Louis Arm­strong imper­son­ator, the shart­ings both delib­er­ate and less so, Tom Hardy’s go-for-broke per­for­mance in the lead role – leave every­thing else feel­ing pedestrian.

When Trank real­ly reach­es for the artis­tic brass ring the recent wave of career reap­praisals have sug­gest­ed may await him, he keels into a divert­ing strain of mad­ness. For the most part, regret­tably, he’s con­tent to slap a gold­en fil­ter over tired gang­ster geri­atrics. If it’s not daz­zling its audi­ence with over-the-top mad­ness, the film looks as wormed-over as the decom­pos­ing lump of man at its centre.

Hardy plays Capone as a macho Nor­ma Desmond, an icon of fad­ing grandeur trans­mo­gri­fied into a ghoul wan­der­ing around the rem­nants of his empire. This com­par­i­son illu­mi­nates a lot of the more out-there choic­es Hardy makes about his own phys­i­cal­i­ty; the din­ner-plate-eyed stare accen­tu­at­ed by his blood­shot blue con­tact lens­es and the stran­gu­lat­ed voice mak­ing him sound like he wants to get that das­tard­ly Mick­ey Mouse owe more to silent film than the exam­ple of the actu­al Capone. What­ev­er his moti­va­tions, Hardy ensures that every­one can see all the work he’s put into this role, an effort­ful method try­ing too hard to make him as impres­sive as he’d like to appear.

Hardy guides his Capone through the same late-in-life cri­sis most recent­ly laid out in The Irish­man, par­tial­ly com­pre­hend­ing of all the dam­age wrought and par­tial­ly unable to reck­on with it. The 2019 gang­ster epic to which Trank owes the most, how­ev­er, is the igno­min­ious Got­ti. From the over­all off-brand aura (Trank vis­i­bly burned through most of his bud­get secur­ing the sprawl­ing Ever­glades estate loca­tion) to the dis­tract­ing facial pros­thet­ics to the list­less stabs at dra­ma, it all smacks of Kevin ​“E From Entourage” Connolly’s direc­to­r­i­al non-signature.

That attempt to raise the dra­mat­ic stakes comes from a sub­plot about a $10 mil­lion cache Capone may or may not have stashed on his prop­er­ty, one of a half-dozen sto­ry wisps dis­si­pat­ing as the Fonz los­es it. His wife (Lin­da Cardelli­ni) won’t stand for his senil­i­ty, his right-hand man (Matt Dil­lon) and feck­less fail-son (Noël Fish­er) have plans of their own, his oily doc­tor (Kyle MacLach­lan) seems to play it fast and loose with the Hip­po­crat­ic Oath, and the alli­ga­tors lurk­ing around his pond want to eat his tes­ti­cles. This all sounds like it should make for a fas­ci­nat­ing, flawed, messy, over­stuffed movie, and yet in prac­tice, it only spo­rad­i­cal­ly breaks the ceil­ing on ​‘inter­est­ing’.

Trank pass­es off a cer­tain reck­less­ness as ambi­tion, his ideas indulged not as part of a bold cre­ative scheme but as the expres­sion of a desire to do what­ev­er stu­dios wouldn’t let him. But this isn’t the fin­ger-to-the-sys­tem mag­num opus that would’ve fit so tidi­ly into the director’s career nar­ra­tive; like the liv­ing mound of pul­verised chuck steak car­ry­ing his film, Trank bare­ly has con­trol over what he’s doing.