Under the Spotlight: Even by Tom Hardy’s standards, ‘Capone’ is distractingly weird
Even though he’s been a mainstream star for almost a decade and a half at this point, much like The Dark Knight Rises co-star Christian Bale, there’s probably a lot of people out there who still don’t have the faintest idea what Tom Hardy sounds like when he’s taking part in an everyday conversation.
It feels like the actor adopts a different accent every time he appears onscreen, which isn’t too far wide of the mark. Not only that, but many of them have been borderline indecipherable. Anyone who claims they understood every word he said in The Revenant or Christopher Nolan’s aforementioned Batman sequel is probably lying, not that it hampered his performances in any way.
Hardy is one of his generation’s best regardless of whether or not he’s intelligible, taking his talents – and vocal gymnastics – to hits and critical darlings alike, including the Venom franchise, Peaky Blinders, playing both of the Kray twins in Legend and whatever it was he was doing in The Bikeriders. However, when it comes to the combination of voice and performance, he’s never been weirder than he was in Capone.
Plenty of actors—including several great ones—have embodied the notorious crime boss onscreen, including Rod Steiger, Jason Robards, Robert De Niro, F Murray Abraham, Jon Bernthal, and Stephen Graham. Understandably, none of them opted to play the character as a desiccated corpse who constantly shits himself, leaving the door wide open for Hardy to waltz right on through and go for broke.
Writer and director Josh Trank’s biographical drama isn’t great, to put it lightly, but Hardy makes it bizarrely – almost morbidly – watchable. In his late 40s and freshly released from prison, Capone struggles with the ravages of neurosyphilis and dementia, robbing him of his faculties as he slowly succumbs to a battle that nobody else in history has ever managed to win.
Perpetually flirting with an extended Saturday Night Live sketch treated with the utmost seriousness, Hardy revels in the free rein he’s been given to approach the part however he wants. With the shackles taken off, what he decides to do is wheeze his way through every single line of dialogue like Gollum with a frog in his throat, occasionally blurting out insults in Italian that gratefully receive subtitles, making them his only lines of dialogue that can be fully comprehended.
Hardy has always been drawn to the stranger side of performance, but Capone illustrates why it’s better to pair him with a director who keeps him on at least some degree of a leash. Trank must have told him to do whatever he wanted, and for the leading man, it was an opportunity to portray the crime boss as a disease-ravaged husk of a man who isn’t quite alive or dead, mumbling his way through an exercise in maximalism that’s exhausting to watch, never mind how taxing it must have been to perform on set.
Overexaggerated to the point of unintentional hilarity, Hardy smokes, poops, and regularly hallucinates his way through a movie that wouldn’t be anywhere near as watchable if there was anybody else in the title role but oxymoronically becomes distracting for those very same reasons. It’s not Hardy being Al Capone, it’s Hardy going batshit in a movie about Al Capone, and it makes for a very curious watch indeed.
