Capone: Weird Biopic of Infamous Gangster Like Rubbernecking A Wreck Despite Tom Hardy

By Liam Lacey

Rating: C

Near the end of his life in 1947, the 20th century’s most notorious gangster Al Capone — demented with neurosyphilis — was cared for by his family in a mansion in Florida. That period is the subject of Capone, a peculiar and sluggish crime drama from The Fantastic Four director Josh Trank, in which a dead-eyed Tom Hardy craps his bed and his pants, wanders the halls of his mansion like Jack Torrance in The Shining, talks to imaginary friends in Italian and English, and makes odd quacking sounds of agitation.

In one scene, he stands on the lawn of his house, in his bathrobe and adult diaper, wielding a gold Tommy gun, blasting away at imaginary enemies. Also, instead of his usual cigar, he chomps on the stub of a carrot because his doctor has warned him about smoking, which should be funny but isn’t.

You may want to see Capone — a film so stylized and perverse it makes Todd Phillips’ Joker look like Downton Abby — but not for insight or amusement. There’s a sort-of plot, involving federal government agent’s attempt to find $10 million that Capone has supposedly hidden somewhere, though he can’t remember.

Kyle MacLachlan shows up as a mob doctor who has been co-opted by the government to try to pry loose the information. The FBI agent Crawford (Jack Lowden) sits down with Capone and his lawyer for a direct interrogation, which is abruptly ended when the incoherent Capone just poops his pants again.

There’s a chilly elegance to the look of Capone, thanks to the superior camera work of cinematographer Peter Deming (David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Twin Peaks). Part of what spooks Capone, a.k.a. “Fonse” are the alligators and the FBI agents lurking around the edges of the lake in front of his house.

Because he’s running short of dough, the Cuban yard workers have to take away some of the Italian statuary on his grounds, including one that looks like a big phallus. Capone’s loss of potency is reliably unsubtle: In one scene, while watching a private screening of The Wizard of Oz, Al jumps up and quacks his way through Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion song, "If I Were the King of the Forest.”

Hardy can be a great actor (Locke, Bronson) but this is one of those conspicuously bad performances, like the work of late Brando or Olivier, which offers diminishing returns on our initial embarrassed fascination. There are other characters drifting around the background, including a few that are apparently hallucinations.

Matt Dillon plays an old gangster pal who takes him fishing, has a drink with him (or maybe he isn’t really there). Visitors to the house include Fonse’s brother Ralphie (Al Sapienza) and his son Junior (Noel Fischer), and his Capone’s wife Mae (Linda Cardellini). Periodically, there are mysterious calls from a son from another woman, Tony (Mason Guccione). Various little kids arrive on holidays, including one little boy with a golden balloon who is apparently Capone’s vision of his child self.

Like many of us current shut-ins, Capone has lots of entertainment options. One night, Al shuffles into a room to see Louis Armstrong (Troy Warren Anderson) growling out “Blueberry Hill.’ Another time, he watches as one of his goons goes on a neck-stabbing frenzy on a hooded man tied to a chair. Periodically, Capone listens to a radio drama replaying his greatest hit, the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.

Capone isn’t a movie of much merit although it is unpleasantly topical. The theme of the unravelling of malignant power is Trumpian. Al Capone’s biographers, A. Brad Schwartz and Max Allan Collins, have written about the parallels between Public Enemy #1 and #45.

I’m also thinking of those claim of Noel Casler, a comedian and former staffer on The Apprentice, who claims Trump wears adult diapers because when he loses his temper, he also loses bowel control.

Now, with a killer disease stalking the halls of the White House and the unmasked president in angry denial, it’s hard not to envision these grisly endgame scenarios.

Capone. Directed and written by Josh Trank. Starring Tom Hardy, Linda Cardellini, Matt Dillon and Kyle MacLachlan. Now available through iTunes.