There's a lovely Joe Orton-ish moment when, visiting his parents' new home after years inside, he learns his old childhood bed is long gone. Most surprising about his Bronson are the shifts into whiny pathos. His mercurial Bronson changes not just from scene to scene, but even in mid-look, jovial beam suddenly falling away to a blankly ominous glare. It may be that sticking a pair of whiskers on an actor brings out the inner Daniel Day-Lewis, but Tom Hardy gives a majestically eccentric, barnstorming performance.
He's an infantile embodiment of machismo in a film peopled by effete authority figures and camp clever-clogs types, such as seedy promoter Paul (Matt King, louchely brittle in leather gloves) and an art teacher bizarrely played by James Lance, all twinkly dance steps and "Olé!" Spanish. His sexuality is marked by terror: seduced by one of Jack's attendant tarts, he flexes a trembling forearm. His civvy-street persona is bizarre: bristling moustaches and dapper three-piece suit, a cross between a sergeant major and a Victorian strongman. Visiting his Uncle Jack – who inhabits an exotic salon-cum-brothel, an implausible Home Counties echo of Blue Velvet – "Mickey" sits silently twiddling the swizzle stick in his drink, as if waiting for someone to pass him the next page of script.Īs the film explores the gap between Bronson's myth and his real self, the term "inner child", for once, is not a cliché: with his shaven head and penchant for nudity, Bronson resembles a giant baby venting its fury. While he has plenty to say for himself on stage, off stage Bronson is inarticulate and oddly defenceless. He is neither the legendary Public Enemy, nor an easily classifiable pathology: the man we see is a dreamer playing to an audience of one, in his own head. A little of this theatricality goes a long way, but also demystifies a man who is presented as unknowably multiple. Narrating his career on stage to a half-seen audience, he appears in clown's pancake, crooning along to newsreel of his exploits or acting out a one-man Punch-and-Judy dialogue, his face divided into male and female halves. Tom Hardy's Bronson himself plays our cheerfully menacing host. But for sheer confrontational verve – and for making you feel as uncomfortable as you would be taking tea with the film's anti-hero – Bronson is quite something. Refn has made a sometimes maddeningly overstated film that almost outstays its welcome just as Bronson has outstayed his at Her Majesty's Pleasure. Refn's first British feature, Bronson is another case of visiting directors catching the tone of our national madness in ways that locals don't. Not only that, it has a Danish art-house auteur at the helm.īronson is directed and co-written by Nicolas Winding Refn, who made the Pusher trilogy, bleak moral tales from Copenhagen low life. But Bronson is not your expected tabloid job for the lads' post-pub DVD market: it's more a Brechtian black comedy, set to Wagner, Verdi and Delibes.
The latest is the story of the most adulated UK tough alive today, Charles Bronson – toasted in headline legend as "Britain's most violent prisoner". We Brits, we do love our hard men, and we love films that celebrate them.
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