BRONSON
****
A volcanic blitzkrieg of sight and sound, director Nicolas Winding Refn’s Bronson lashes out onto its audience like an unleashed hound from hell; ferocious, uncompromising, violent, and loud, it is the single most audacious and stylish depiction of violence since Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange - and the comparisons don’t stop there.
The recipient of the British Independent Film Award for Best Actor, actor Tom Hardy is a revelation as titular, true-life protagonist Charles Bronson. Born Michael Gordon Peterson, the self-renamed Bronson is a legend in England as “The Most Violent Prisoner in Britain” - a title, the film suggests, that he defended and upheld passionately, getting himself kicked out of one prison after another via violent fights and hostage-taking, before ultimately ending up spending over thirty years in solitary confinement. To say that 32-year-old Hardy transforms himself into Bronson is an understatement - a former model with boyish good looks, Hardy put on 42 pounds of muscle for the role, commanding the screen with an intimidating physique. One expects Bronson could smash through a wall, and half the fun of watching the film is waiting to see when and if he’ll do exactly that.
Of course, since the film’s release in the UK, the question has often been raised: What’s the point? Why make a film about a violent thug with delusions of grandeur? I applaud writers Brock Norman Brock and Nicolas Winding Refn, who also directed, for recognizing the cinematic potential in Bronson’s story - for every Richard Nixon there’s a Richard Ramirez, a national headline-heavy cause célèbre whose story makes as good a subject for a film as the next, and whose legend as an antihero may make for as colorful a narrative journey than that of a legendary hero. Under Refn’s direction, Bronson’s journey is colorful, epic, and deeply stylish. Accented by a soundtrack that almost transcends the collection of songs that provided a pulse to Trainspotting - Glass Candy’s Digital Versicolor, with its time warp Giorgio Moroder-inspired hook, provides a glimpse into the feverish, passionate urgency of Bronson’s ultra-violence - the film skirts on MTV-style biopic, if not for moments of pause that serve to remind the audience that, yes this may all be quite humorous and entertaining, but this really happened, and somewhere out there, this man is really rotting in prison.
It would have seemed impossible that an actor would ever rival A Clockwork Orange’s Malcolm McDowell in sheer cocky malevolence - and what’s more, make it look so easy - but Hardy pulls it off. What’s more, he endures punches, bruises, and more than a couple of full-frontal shots while doing it. It is a true tour de force performance, one of those “I know they don’t recognize roles like this, but I really wish they would…” portrayals that, in a perfect world, would sweep every major acting award.
Bronson is playing at Los Angeles’ Downtown Independent Theatre through Tuesday, February 9.
- Logan Crow
February 3, 2010
One Comment on “BRONSON”
Comment:
February 4th, 2010 at 6:47 pm
i love your review! it was indeed a “volcanic blikzkrieg of sight and sound”. makes me want to see the movie again.