Bronson Movie Review
The London penal system has no idea what to do with Michael Peterson, famously on record as its most violent criminal. If the film Bronson can be believed, their solution was to beat him intensely and often. Strangely, that’s also director Nicolas Winding Refn’s answer to his subject. Bronson, so named because Peterson adopts the full name of action star Charlie, is a pseudo-biography about a real life man who entered prison as a low-level bank robber and is still there today, infamous for taking hostages and inciting riots that would make UFC fighters cower. Refn’s film isn’t the whole truth; it might not even be half the truth, but it creates a violently swirling vortex around its central figure, played to rage-filled precision by Tom Hardy.
“All my life I’ve wanted to be famous” says Bronson in the film’s opening which has Hardy dressed up on a stage pantomiming a Victorian melodrama. Later, we also learn that he has been behind bars for 34 years and that the offense that landed him in prison was a postal robbery in which no one was hurt and the sentence was a mere 7.
What occurred then, that has kept Bronson behind bars for so long and earned him such a volatile reputation? Like The Dark Knight taught us, some men just want to watch the world burn. Bronson isn’t as ambitious; in a twisted variation of the Tootsie Pop quandary, he just wants to see how many licks from a nightstick it takes to cave in a man’s skull. In an example of bad planning, the test skull is his.
Erratic, violent and perversely amused by his own deviance, Bronson just enjoys brawling. Possibly he enjoys the beatings he receives afterwards even more. I’m not talking simple inmate brawls, but the kind of wild animal attacks that result in hostages and angry, pent-up guards breaking down the door and thrashing men like human piñatas. His psychosis, if that’s what you want to call it, is a difficult one to pin down. The movie really doesn’t try at first. It just sprays, in every direction, the insanity and gallows humor that Bronson employs in his staged assaults.
Refn doesn’t adopt a perfect realism for the picture, but instead creates a kind of surrealistic tone poem that features at its center a man both artistic and intelligent but brutal nearly to the point of parody. There is no obvious cause or culprit cited for his behavior or the predicament in which he finds himself. Refn also does not let the archaic and lopsided prison environment off the hook, nor does he clear Bronson himself of blame.
Interestingly, there is an undercurrent of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange in the suggestion that the two opposing forces have worked hand in hand, albeit inadvertently, to achieve the muscular, smirking mustachioed wild card standing before us on stage. Bronson’s is a sickness that was probably just waiting for the right environment to free it, and the wardens, guards and management of the prison have unending confidence in their theory that fighting fire with fire can work as long as you always have the bigger flame.
I admired Bronson but I was never moved to actually like it. The pieces are all here and Nicholas Refn, who directed the compelling Pusher series, actually utilizes some of Kubrick’s antiseptic and baroque visual flourishes. From time to time, the movie is blackly comedic and a few times it’s hauntingly lovely. When Bronson locks himself in with his artist mentor and patiently waits for the guards to arrive, covering himself in his brand of ‘war paint’, Refn crafts the scene to suggest Bronson as the most extreme of outsider artists, creating a portrait of unchecked chaos on the battered but still formidable canvas of his own body. I’m not sure I buy that, but it’s an interesting thought, at least for a while. The real problem with Bronson is that it never stays with one idea or interpretation very long. The only constants in the picture are the brutal fight scenes and Hardy’s smiling, happy sociopath.
Hardy has played glowering and amoral men before, most notably Bill Sykes in 2005’s Oliver Twist. Here he has bulked up for his role as Charlie, both physically and mentally. I imagine this performance helped him land a role in the next Mad Max movie, Fury Road, and he could really play either part perfectly well; fury or the road. Hardy makes Charlie almost likable and in the early going, for those first few attacks, it’s as if he’s sticking it to the system and the man all at the same time.
But there are only so many times you want to be beaten to the ground, even cinematically, and his unpredictability distances him from the audience. He isn’t safe in any reasonable meaning of the term. There is an interesting character in Bronson, as imagined by Refn and conjured by Hardy, but he’s too much of a wild card. Once they have summoned him, they can’t contain him or pin him down so they just let the fists fly. Pity, because this one really could have been something more.
