Review: Capone Superficially Keys Itself to a Gangster’s Rattled Mind

Every scene is virtually self-contained, and so Capone feels as if it’s starting all over again from frame to frame.

Capone
Photo: Vertical Entertainment

In Capone, writer-director Josh Trank transforms the last year of the eponymous Prohibition-era gangster’s life into a slipstream of crime and horror film tropes. As Trank tells it it, Alphonse “Al” Capone (Tom Hard) has been living for a while in his mansion in Palm Island, Florida under F.B.I. supervision, after having been released from prison due to his struggle with syphilis. At the film’s start in 1947, Capone (Tom Hardy) is suffering from dementia, soiling himself and succumbing to hallucinations. He sees men lingering in the trees bordering his estate, some of whom are real, and is convinced that there’s a conspiracy to steal from him, which is partially rooted in the truth. Meanwhile, his wife, Mae (Linda Cardellini), steadfastly weathers his aggression and escalating insanity.

This premise suggests a hothouse piece of alternate history, something akin to Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables, but in the key of Tennessee Williams. Unfortunately, the only element of the film that lives up to that potential is the Capone compound, with its Roman statues, menacing green woods, and murky bodies of water. The home is gaudy, reflecting Capone’s garishness, and it abounds in dark nooks and crannies and vast chambers, from which Trank occasionally springs shadowy figures and weirdly menacing partygoers who’re reminiscent of the Overlook’s supernatural residents from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. However, Trank doesn’t allow sequences to build off one another. Every scene is virtually self-contained, and so Capone feels as if it’s starting all over again from frame to frame.

Like many filmmakers who portray mental illness, Trank seems to believe that narrative arbitrariness reflects his protagonist’s disorientation, and it does, to an extent, but once that point is made there’s nowhere for the film to go but in circles. Essentially, an epilogue has been stretched to feature length here. We don’t register Capone’s loss of self, as he’s already lost when the film opens, and Hardy defines Capone by a few self-consciously performative quirks without variation: slurred, growling, barely understandable speech, a mouth constantly clenching a cigar, stooped body language, and so forth. Capone is tedious in the same fashion as Sally Potter’s recent The Roads Not Taken, as both are designed as traps that fanatically revel in a doomed person’s inscrutability. In each film, this fanaticism is meant to telegraph the director’s integrity, though it’s really a failure of imagination.

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It was shrewd of Trank to capitalize on a lesser-known portion of an oft-dramatized criminal’s life, but his anecdotes are so vague that they could be about any gangster, real or fictional. So few details are offered on Capone’s family life that questions arise: How did Mae first react to her husband’s syphilis? Does she have syphilis? How do Mae, their children, and Capone’s various hangers-on feel about his legacy as a ruthless bootlegger and killer? If they’re in denial, which is suggested by a promising scene with a friend, Johnny (Matt Dillion), Trank barely acknowledges it. Apart from Capone and Mae, characters wander in and out of the film randomly, and so we barely know who most of these people are to Capone or one another. Mae is stereotypically defined as the suffering, saintly wife, while Capone is a grunting monster. That’s the extent of Trank’s sense of portraiture and historical context.

Trank is most fascinated with Capone’s hallucinations. There’s an admirably insane sequence in which Capone wanders around his compound with a golden Tommy gun, chewing a carrot in place of a cigar, mowing friends and employees down with extreme prejudice. If this scene had been prepared for gradually, serving as a cathartic explosion of Capone’s bitterness and paranoia, it might’ve been astonishing rather than amusing. Another moment finds Capone shooting an alligator who eats a fish he’s reeling into his boat while hanging out with Johnny, which Dillon steals with his matter-of-fact rendering of Johnny’s disbelieve at his friend’s impulsivity. There are also a few refreshingly specific details sprinkled throughout the film, such as the family’s insistence that Capone be called “Fonz” rather than Al, and one clever in-joke: Pagliacci can be heard on the soundtrack, which is the opera that Capone attended in The Untouchables while a hit was carried out on one of his enemies.

But these bits and pieces can’t distract from Capone’s superficiality. Even the promise of the hallucinations is squandered, as Trank shortchanges a potentially wicked irony: that Capone’s instability was exacerbated by the F.B.I.’s nearby surveillance of him. Such a scenario could encourage a guessing game on the part of the audience as to which lurid situations are real—a possibility which Trank only occasionally exploits. Capone simply hasn’t been shaped with enough discipline. The film fritters itself away, its erraticism coming to suggest Capone’s rattled mind more viscerally than any of Trank’s intentional conceits.

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Score: 
 Cast: Tom Hardy, Linda Cardellini, Noel Fisher, Kyle MacLachlan, Matt Dillon, Kathrine Narducci, Jack Lowden, Al Sapienza, Tilda Del Toro, Wayne Pére, Mason Guccione  Director: Josh Trank  Screenwriter: Josh Trank  Distributor: Vertical Entertainment  Running Time: 103 min  Rating: R  Year: 2020

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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