Biopics are, by nature, reductionist—forced to whiddle entire messy, disorganized lives into tidy, readymade narratives. And yet no film has been quite as willfully reductionist as Bronson, which chronicles the life of the Briton-born Michael Peterson. Sentenced to seven years for a minor stick-up, Peterson—who eventually changed his name to Charles Bronson for extra attention-nabbing—has spent the majority of his life behind bars, and the majority of those in solitary confinement due to endless fights, kidnappings and riots that amplified his sentence to absurd lengths.
As you can surmise, there’s not much story to fuel a traditional two-hours-and-change award gobbler. A 90-minute art film? Well, that’s another story. This summer, Il Divo, concerning crooked Italian politician Giulio Andreotti, floated by with a single cinema-friendly insight into its subject. So, too, does Bronson, which argues that its anti-hero is a twisted kind of performance artist, whose canvas is his life and whose brush is ultraviolence.
Fully embodied in a ferocious turn by Tom Hardy, Bronson is either brawling madly, or waiting to brawl madly. One of the first scenes shows him, naked and greased up, in a barely-lit cage, working himself up before an army of armed guards storms in.
Also like Il Divo, Bronson boasts a striking figure, physically.
Super-ripped, with a bald head and an endless, hilarious handlebar mustache, Hardy resembles a demented circus strongman. A social retard in his brief stint between sentences, he’s happily autonomous and always “on.”
But at least ll Divo offered facts. Bronson offers almost none. Its middle section is mostly fiction. It exists in a vaccuum and decades pass while Bronson never ages.
How Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn (the Pusher trilogy) pads this out to feature length is simple: arresting filmmaking. He changes styles, cutting from proper scenes to Bronson on a stage, reciting monologues in gawdy make-up, at times suggesting Chopper, another darkly comic paean to a psychopath that boasts a starmaking lead performance. The idea is to capture how Bronson sees himself, and in doing so, Refn challenges both the biopic and the idea of what defines an artist. B+
Article:
The Messenger
Article:
Rashomon
Article:
The Blind Side
Article:
2012
Article:
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men
Article:
(Untitled)
Article:
Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire
Article:
The Maid
