At one point during Capone, Tom Hardy, as the ageing mobster, goes on a deranged shooting spree wearing a dressing gown, a carrot stuffed in his mouth like a stogie and mowing people down with a solid-gold Tommy gun. It’s an image that crystalises the ups and downs of Josh Trank’s first film since the 2015 Fantastic Four debacle. It’s unhinged, and lacks subtleties and depths, but also has an imagination and out-there-ness that is rarely found in franchises. In detailing the last year of the gangster’s life, Capone is neither the magnificent phoenix from the ashes you’d hope for nor the total misfire some US reviews suggest. At the very least, here is a filmmaker (Trank writes, directs and edits) shooting for the stars; sometimes he hits, sometimes he misses.
In some senses Capone is a quasi-sequel to The Untouchables. Having been imprisoned for income tax evasion and losing his mental and physical faculties to neurosyphilis, the 48-year-old Capone, known to his family as ‘Fonz’, is living out his life in Florida under surveillance from the Feds. There is a plot-hook — Fonz has hidden $10 million but, due to his illness, can’t remember where he buried it — but Trank shows little interest in it (although there is a fantastic scene in which government agents, including one played by Trank, interview the practically comatose gangster, who subsequently craps himself). Instead, this is a character study of a powerhouse in decline.
If Tom Hardy never really gets under Fonz’s skin, he is immense.
There are glimpses into his family life — a wasted Linda Cardellini as Fonz’s loving wife; a through-line about an unacknowledged son that never really amounts to anything — but where the film takes off is in Trank’s depiction of Fonz’s psyche, blurring the lines between mundane reality and feverish fantasy. From wandering through a party full of flappers where Louis Armstrong sings ‘Blueberry Hill’ to watching his muscle, Gino (Gino Cafarelli), repeatedly stab a goon in the neck, these moments add a Lynchian sense of nightmare to what could have been a bog-standard biopic.
Playing Capone at 48 but looking years older under the prosthetics, Hardy delivers a huge, Method-y performance, squinting and stumbling around in diapers, growling and mumbling (there are subtitles) without a shred of sentimentality. If he never really gets under Fonz’s skin, he is immense, be it blasting a crocodile with a shotgun on a fishing trip or poignantly singing along with Bert Lahr's Cowardly Lion to ‘If I Were The King Of The Forest’ during a home screening of The Wizard Of Oz (a funny deconstruction of the film follows). The sense of a fall from a great height, underlined by Fonz’s possessions being repossessed from his own personal Xanadu, echoes Citizen Kane. Trank obviously gets nowhere near Welles’ masterwork. But then, Kane never featured a man chewing on a vegetable rat-a-tat-ing a luxury machine gun, so who is the real winner?
