I don’t know if I’d call Capone “highly anticipated,” but it’s hard not to at least be mildly curious as to how writer/director, Josh Trank, makes his comeback after his now infamous downfall following the critical and box office disaster of Fantastic Four, and the fallout resulting from his disowning the film during release to the loss of high profile gigs (I highly recommend reading this Polygon article from Matt Patches, by the way). The film has certainly been a long time coming, having been filmed in 2018, and awaiting distribution for quite a while until it finally got unceremoniously dumped on VOD.
The film, as you’d expect from the title, follows the notorious gangster Al Capone (Tom Hardy), but it does not explore him in his heyday. Here we have Capone, or Fonse as his family and friends call him, in what is to be the last year of his life, rotting away with syphilis and dementia in his mansion in Palm Island, Florida. While there, he is under the careful watch of the FBI, who suspect he may be faking his mental state. He also deals in nightmares and hallucinations that bring to life the horrific memories from his life as a feared gangster.
Straying from the usual biopic formula, what Trank does here is really fascinating since he essentially uses the visual language of a haunted house picture. Imagine the last half hour of The Irishman, but instead of the nursing home, Robert De Niro’s Frank Sheeran was in the Overlook Hotel. While there is a thread about everyone around Fonse wanting him to recollect where he supposedly hid $10 million, that is mostly sits in the backseat while Trank focuses largely on evoking an ominous and sinister mood, indulging in striking and often violent flashbacks and the way they haunt him in his deteriorating state.
Which brings us to Fonse himself, or more specifically, Tom Hardy’s performance, which is quite something. Hardy taps into all his usual fascinations as a performer with extensive prosthetics, heavily altered physicality, and extensive changes to his voice, and it results in his most swing-for-the-fences turn in a really long time. He spends most of the film mumbling and stumbling around the halls of his home, falling in and out of his hallucinations, and occasionally pooping his pants. It’s a performance that’s equally bizarre and showy (though according to the bit of research I did, the voice is probably closer to the real thing than you’d expect), but it somehow manages to work with this particular take on telling his story.
Trank attempts to give Hardy’s co-stars some space to shine, even if it’s ultimately a futile one. I’m not sure when exactly Linda Cardellini became the go-to for playing “the wife,” I feel like it doesn’t quite do her skills justice, but she gets more moments here than the rest of her co-stars. She delivers one hell of a slap at one point. Kyle MacLachlan, Jack Lowden, Matt Dillon, Noel Fisher, Kathrine Narducci, Gino Cafarelli, and Mason Guccione all do a fine enough job with what they’re given, but this is Hardy’s movie first and foremost.
The film is largely well made. Trank is working with cinematographer, Peter Deming, a regular David Lynch and Sam Raimi collaborator, to create these lingering, moody, and elegantly lit and staged sequences of Fonse wandering the halls, seated on his patio with a cigar sticking from his mouth, staring into space, or coming face-to-face with a scene from his past. The score from El-P is mostly subdued, but effective in adding to the unnerving atmosphere, and putting you in Fonse’s headspace. However, I do think the sets and costumes really lack a lived-in quality, and the clean, digital sheen does it no favors.
I’m not totally convinced that Capone adds up to all that much, there’s specifically a subplot involving a mysterious caller that isn’t as strongly developed as it could have been, but for me, there is not a single dull moment. It’s a relentlessly nasty, weird, bewildering, and immensely entertaining experience from start to finish. Tom Hardy has always been one of modern cinema’s most daring and compelling performers, and even when it’s hard to tell what exactly he’s going for, he remains an effortlessly watchable presence. I can’t quite tell you what statement Josh Trank is trying to make here, maybe there’s something to be said about Trank centering his big comeback around a former bigshot facing the consequences of past sins. However, if he gets more opportunities to indulge himself, I’m very much on board with whatever it is, and perhaps over time, he might be able to hone his skills in a way that could result in something that is genuinely great.