Capone (2020)

 rating: ****

the story: Al Capone in his last year, riddled with dementia.

the review: Sometimes great acting is its own reward. Capone isn’t just about great acting but great storytelling, too, though.

Getting films released obviously got a lot harder when the pandemic hit. Capone started out as Fonzo but metamorphosed to get its release. Whatever hassles were involved, they were well worth it. Tom Hardy is the “great acting” in question, even if he’s absurdly hard for critics and mass audiences to love. He scored a box office hit with his last movie, Venom, despite a considerable amount of doubt, but for the most part he’s the rare instance where critics and audiences converged to scoff at the hype he’s amassed in the ten years since his breakout appearance in Inception.

And he’s playing Al Capone here, the second time he’s done a gangster movie (after the criminally underrated Legend, dismissed by the critics as “just another Kray Brothers rehash”...despite the fact that no one outside of England had ever heard of them).

Only, he’s not playing “Al Capone,” as in the dude at the height of his powers, but the guy after he’s been released from prison because it’s been determined...he’s no threat to anyone anymore.

(Ah, unless he imagines it.)

It’s not as if we’ve never seen deconstruction in film before. My personal favorite is The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, for instance. But to do it to a gangster, let alone a famous one, let alone a real one...We’re used to glorifying these guys, since at least The Godfather, since the nauseatingly acclaimed Goodfellas. We hear Capone fart. There’s nothing pretty here. This is a guy even the feds realize isn’t worth anything anymore.

The folks who still love him are his family, those who work for him. He’s got bills that need paying, things that need selling to pay them, a museum of a home that gets gutted to do so. The movie bookends itself at Thanksgiving and the granddaughter who in all innocence idolizes Capone.

Hardy’s Capone is practically catatonic. He’s an actor who can be compelling almost entirely by looking compelling, and director Josh Trank is brave enough to let him. Trank knows deconstruction. He did Chronicle, he did the Fantastic Four remake, which dared to sideline three of four major characters, for the most part. Nothing is sacred to him except the dramatic results. 

Surrounding Hardy are Linda Cardellini in the traditional long-suffering wife archetype, Kyle MacLachlan as the guy trying to keep Capone’s remaining wits together, and Matt Dillon as the guy who thinks it’s still possible to find his hidden treasures. They ground the movie in enough traditional expectations that it’s easier to accept it on Trank’s and Hardy’s terms.

For some reason we find it increasingly difficult to appreciate great acting. The less ambitious Daniel Day-Lewis got, the more he was loved. I don’t get it. Hardy remains as ambitious as they come, and he’s yet to dip into Johnny Depp levels of cartoonery. There’s always the sense that he believes in the integrity of his creations, even the bombastic Bane. He’s one of the few actors, or perhaps the only actor, who could sit in a car the whole movie, literally the whole movie, and be the only actor we see throughout it, and still be completely compelling (Locke). Hardy’s Capone is a great performance.

And on that level alone, this is a must-see. But the whole movie works.