Capone: The Movie
As a great admirer of the British actor Tom Hardy, I was eagerly looking forward to his performance in the title roll of Capone. But his portrayal, like the film itself, is one of the most ill conceived in movie history, for which I blame not Hardy so much as writer/director Josh Trank.
The film claims to be “based on true events” (which is itself a common but curious phrase: “actual events,” “real events,” “historical events,” maybe, but what exactly are “true events?”) But the emphasis should have been on “based,” for beyond the basic fact that Capone suffered from tertiary syphilis and spent his last years on an estate in Florida, the rest is an operatic grandiosity that strait-jackets Hardy into giving an A-to-B performance as Capone that is narrower than Boris Karloff’s as Frankenstein’s monster.
For anyone unfamiliar with Capone’s life, the movie must be a bewilderment, for all we see of him is a snarling, slack-jawed monster without any intimation of his past prodigious strokes of criminal genius. What we see instead is a kind of subhuman instead of the all-too-human and all-too-American creature he was.
The fact is that though Capone had been subjected to toxic prison treatments for his syphilis, after his release he had achieved a degree of rehabilitation over several months’ treatment in Baltimore, where the penitentiary’s experimental and possibly malintended doses of arsenic, mercury, and bismuth were halted.
No one would argue that the Capone who returned thereafter to his home in Miami was the same Big Al who, lawyered-up and dressed to the nines, had strutted into a federal courtroom eight years earlier, confident of acquittal. After the Federal jury he had fixed was summarily replaced by another that convicted him on a demonstrably shaky tax rap, his imprisonment first in Cook County and then Alcatraz, his years of corrosive medical treatments, his isolation from his family, his stabbing by a fellow convict, and the gradual knocking off of many of his loyalists, he was so diminished that when his family greeted him they could hardly recognize him.
He may well have been nuts, but shortly before his release, he had mastered the banjo, composed songs, and written heartfelt and entirely coherent letters to his wife and son. He abjured any claim to the leadership of the Chicago Outfit he had built into the most powerful criminal enterprise in the nation, and merely asked his successors, through his loyal older brother Ralph, to provide him with a sufficient allowance to sustain him and his family and a small cadre of bodyguards. But photographs taken after his return to Miami show not Trank’s growling, hawking, perpetually disheveled and incontinent lunatic but a somewhat benign forty-something: a little like Danny DeVito’s character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: indulged, spacey, mischievous, labile, and given to dumb pranks.
It may be irrelevant to a movie that is itself a hallucination, but there’s a lot that Trank got wrong. Capone’s estate was nothing like the movie’s vast domain. His Palm Island home was set not on the movie’s gator-haunted lagoon but on a peninsula gently slapped by the wakes of the yachts that gaily traversed Biscayne Bay. He did not share a bed with his wife Mae, but by the time of his death occupied a single bed in a separate bedroom. By all accounts he was a fond (if serially unfaithful) husband and a devoted father, deeply grateful to Mae for keeping the family’s head above water. There is no evidence that Capone had an illegitimate son who emerged toward the end of Capone’s life to challenge Mae’s “Sonny.” And Capone died a few days after his 48th birthday of not, strictly speaking, syphilis (for which he was being effectively treated with penicillin) but cardiac arrest.
I don’t know why Trank has the family addressing Alphonse Gabriel Capone as “Fonzy”; Capone hated the nicknames that the press applied to him, and would have hated this as well. Nor was he likely, in extremis, to erupt in bootleg Napolitan. He may have spoken it indulgently to his mother, but a key to his enormous success was that he was no clannish, parochial Sicilian Mafioso but a native-born, backslapping, heavy-tipping American businessman who tried his best to speak proper English without a trace of an accent, patronized jazz musicians, and employed in the higher ranks of the Outfit men of Jewish, Irish, and Eastern European extraction.
I suppose Trank’s movie plays into the public’s moralistic interest in seeing Capone’s demise as the inevitable consequence of his villainy. In this it joins all the other Capone bio-pics in devising a simple-minded moral to Capone’s complex, contradictory story. But Capone is as cinematically unsound as it is historically inaccurate. It’s as if Orson Welles had restricted his depiction of John Foster Cain to his dismal, deranged last days, without telling the story of his rise nor demonstrating America’s complicity in granting him his monstrous wealth and power.
