Twilight of the mobster
Hardy squints, growls and stares as washed-up Capone
CAPONE
out of 5
Cast: Tom Hardy,
Linda Cardellini, Matt Dillon
Director: Josh Trank
Duration: 1 h 43 m
Available: On demand
In Capone, Tom Hardy, as the aging, not-all-there Al Capone, acts under a corpse-grey mask of desiccated-mobster makeup and he speaks in a bullfrog croak so raspy it sounds like he’s only got one or two vocal cords left, and they’ve been burnt to a crisp.
It’s 1946, and Capone’s days as the underworld kingpin of Chicago are gone. So are the 11 years he spent in prison for tax evasion. He’s now 47, a retired gangster, comfortable but ailing, teetering toward death as he drifts through the days at his creamy Florida mansion, with federal agents watching his every move.
Written and directed by Josh Trank (The Fantastic Four, Chronicle), Capone is a portrait of the mobster as a burnt-out husk.
Hardy’s Capone is blotchy and pasty. His scowling lips are wrapped around a huge cigar, and when he takes it out it’s generally to growl like an animal, explode over some ancient vendetta or retch into a bucket.
The mobster is suffering the effects of paresis, a form of dementia brought on by latestage syphilis. He’s incontinent, and his memory is going. So is his ability to distinguish reality from fantasy (at times the film slips into a sequence that turns out to be from his imagination). Lurching around in a silk bathrobe, Capone still exudes a coiledsnake aura of violence, but much of the time Hardy squints off into space with that stunted, vaguely forlorn zombie stare — the one he perfected for his blitzed-outof-his-gourd performance in
Mad Max: Fury Road. That you often have to work to decipher what he’s saying now seems an element of the Hardy mystique (the one he launched as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises under that face mask). You’re grateful when Capone blurts out a line in Italian, because at least the subtitles allow you to understand him.
Is this an idiosyncratic twilight-of-the-mobster drama? Or is it a Saturday Night Live sketch with pretensions? It may be a bit of both. The concept feels original, even if it does suggest the last half-hour of The Irishman crossed with the doddering-legend parts of Citizen Kane.
By the end, he’s ailing, he’s losing his mind and his sins are oozing out of him like poison.
Hardy’s performance is starkly unsentimental, yet part of its fetishized authenticity is that Capone never has anything very interesting to say. Near the end, he finally gets his skewed version of a shoot-the-works gangster climax: Capone firing off a machine gun made of gold at enemies real and imagined. From the looks of it, he’s gone around the bend, but we’re supposed to think he’s now in touch with the side of himself that cares.