Bronson

“My name is Charlie Bronson,” Tom Hardy declares to camera, and so begins an exploration of Britain’s most famous criminal, and, perhaps fittingly, the fact that for most of Bronson’s infamous career, he was not known by that Hollywood moniker lifted from the Death Wish muscle-man, instead going by his birth name of Michael Peterson.

Naming is central to Bronson, as the audience is faced by a man so close to inscrutable mania any simple handles are essential for us to understand what we are dealing with. On the one hand, we see Bronson as the performer, delivering monologues and brief performance pieces to an audience that is largely mute and unreadable. He proclaims to have a set of rules which he always abides, sometimes even unwittingly, as the final scene in the asylum reveals. On the other, Bronson as inmate presents us with brooding frustration and an ever-ready tongue, willing to declare “You fucking cunt” at the first sign of a prison warden.

Peterson’s story is terrifying in its simplicity: a decent enough upbringing, but a penchant for violence, for spectacle, had the young husband sentenced to 7 years in prison. He had, at the time of filming, served 34 years in various penitentiaries, 30 of them in solitary confinement. But the film does not ask why explicitly, and merely tries to delve into the man’s mind and present the facts, as far as we can gather them, from Bronson’s perspective instead. That is what elevates the piece from being just another biopic, or indeed a celebration of violence; we are incarcerated with Charlie Bronson as he rails against everything he cannot comprehend. We are there for the ride.

The film is far from perfect: there are a couple of gaping plot holes (particularly with Alison, the girl Bronson falls for in his 69 day spell on the outside, who simply fades out of the narrative as she pursues engagement with an even-more-unseen Brian) but these can be forgiven by the format: the film purports to be based on a true story, and life is so often stranger than fiction. And the central question of the piece: how much we can in fact understand Charlie Bronson, is left answered, in its own way, by how strange a creature he becomes. His early hulking silences, taken to be scheming, by the close seem much more significant: the blanks of a mind so completely turned upon itself and other humans as to be entirely inaccessible. Tom Hardy’s performance is startling and visceral; it’s hard to look away from him as he transforms from man to something else entirely. That alone leaves the film with a recommendation; but there’s something in the construction, in the pathos evoked and the quasi-stylised violence, again and again, underpinning Bronson’s strange moral code, that elevates Bronson from violent thriller to something much more. Chilling. 

~~~

2008

Tom Hardy

dir. Nicolas Winding Refn