Mark Reviews Movies: CAPONE (2020)

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | May 11, 2020

Everybody knows the story of Alphonse Capone, the notorious gangster, known as "Scarface," who ran the mob on the south side of Chicago during the 1920s and probably ordered the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. The irony of his downfall, of course, is that he wasn't taken down for his most sensational crimes. It was tax evasion that was his legal undoing.

This is as much information as writer/director Josh Trank's Capone offers about its central figure, whose criminal career has ended by the start of the movie's story, set during the final year of the crime lord's life. The Capone of this movie has been mentally and physically ravaged by syphilis, which he contracted at the age of 15, and a stroke. He lives in a mansion in Palm Island, Florida, where people seem to come and go, although most of the visitors are in his mind, while workers from a collection crew pack up his most valuable possessions.

His life is all but gone, and by the end of the movie, any physical trace of him has disappeared, too. The mansion is bare, and most of his family members end up changing their surname to evade the shame.

The concept of Trank's movie, which just follows the declining Capone on a tour of his physical and mental deterioration, is sound. We get what the filmmaker is trying to do—to eliminate the glitz and glamour of a criminal legend, making him a feeble old man who's only in his late 40s, and to force the character to confront the horrors and failures of his life. The Florida mansion more or less becomes a haunted house—absent of most of his family, visited by the ghosts of those who died on his orders or because they were associated with him, transforming into a night club that he would have frequented in his prime.

While all of this is happening, in reality, the former mob boss hacks, wheezes, and cannot control his own bodily functions. Late in the movie, there's a memorable image—although probably not for the reasons that Trank fully intended—of our protagonist stomping around the grounds of his mansion, wielding a gold-plated Tommy gun while dressed in a robe, chomping on a carrot, and wearing a drooping diaper. There's the image of himself, as well as the figure of legend, and then there's the miserable reality.

The idea, again, is more than sound. Trank's envisioning of this mansion—a decadent estate with rooms and hallways that might as well go on forever, for all of the shadows thrown upon them—is striking. The juxtaposition of the central character's concept of himself and the truth of his current existence comes through loudly and clearly.

Trank's actual approach to his core idea, though, is far from effectual. The filmmaker has sacrificed clarity for amplification. To begin, there's Tom Hardy's performance as Capone—known to those close to him as "Fonse," never "Al"—which slips from caricature to parody with such regularity that the climactic image, of the man with his signature machine gun, is absurd and pathetic for all the wrong reasons. Mostly unintelligible, whether or not there's a cigar or carrot shoved between his lips, Hardy mumbles, growls, and croaks in a thick "New Yawk" dialect. Our ability to understand him becomes as much of a struggle as trying to determine why Trank would allow such hamminess to overwhelm his apparently sincere goals.

As for those constant visions, they're vague, uninformative, and ultimately repetitive. Trank's screenplay relies on us knowing the basics of Capone's life and career (That's all some introductory sentences, as well as a radio play about the infamous Chicago massacre in the background, explain), and then the movie tosses us into assorted hallucinations about, dreams of, and/or flashbacks to people and events, without any attempt to put them within the context of the man's life.

We meet Johnny (Matt Dillon), an old acquaintance who comes to see Fonse, only to discover he's a figment of the mob boss' imagination—and what actually happened to him. We learn Fonse has an illegitimate son (played by Mason Guccione), whose collect calls from Cleveland go ignored, and there's the suggestion of the boy's mother, her fate, and some other massacre. Meanwhile, Fonse's long-suffering wife Mae (Linda Cardellini) puts up with her husband's delusions and mostly earned paranoia about people keeping tabs on him.

It's odd to see a movie that is so clear in purpose but so misguided in execution. Capone tries to make the internal suffering of its eponymous subject as real as the collapse of his body and mind. Instead, the movie is a stylistically over-the-top and thematically shallow cacophony of silly or half-formed ideas.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products