William Bibbiani Reviews Bronson!
As I previously stated in my World’s Greatest Dad review, favorable reviews are difficult to write. There’s something fundamentally untrustworthy about a list of positive qualities largely unmarred by constructive (and hilariously phrased) criticism. The critic feels like a corporate shill and the reader eventually starts to wonder if we’re trying to sell them a time share: a lose/lose situation for everyone. Bronson, the latest film from Nicolas Winding Refn (The Pusher Trilogy), presents such a challenge. Only a few minutes ago I scrapped my first draft of this review, in which I committed myself wholeheartedly to the ill-advised conceit that while Bronson may be “One of the Best Films of the Year,” it was also the least accurate biography of Perfect Strangers star Bronson Pinchot that I had ever seen.
Bronson is actually the story of Charlie Bronson, nee Michael Peterson, a small-time English criminal who was initially thrown in prison for stealing little more than 26 pounds, only have his sentence repeatedly extended for violent outbursts, hostage crises and protests. To date, he has served over 34 years in over 120 prisons throughout Great Britain, and has served over 30 of those years in solitary confinement. Ordinarily, this would be a recipe for a Bob Dylan song/Norman Jewison film about wrongful imprisonment. “Oh, woe is Charlie Bronson,” for example. But not so for Nicolas Winding Refn, who depicts his protagonist as a clever but highly antisocial and dangerous attention-seeker. Barely able to function outside of his institutional environment, Michael Peterson transforms himself into the persona of Charlie Bronson, who becomes the most famous prisoner in the country. He clearly lives for imprisonment, which may be constricting but does have distinct rules which he can break with relative impunity: the worst they can do is keep him in locked up in a place where he gets all the attention he craves.
As a character, Charlie Bronson is captivating because he knows exactly what he wants – notoriety of any kind – and perpetually pursues this end in explosive and unexpected ways. The lack of specificity to his motivations contributes to his mystique. He doesn’t want to become famous for writing the perfect rock ballad or for compiling the world’s largest ball of twine, he just wants to be famous for its own sake and he can do that by simply being more randomly violent than anybody else, which provides him with a lot of creative freedom. As fantastically portrayed by Tom Hardy (hereafter forgiven for his part in Star Trek: Nemesis) Charlie Bronson is an unsculpted ball of raw charisma. If he wasn’t destined for solitary confinement, he would have been destined for parliament. It’s the kind of performance – mannered but always believable – that seems destined for an Academy Award nomination, on par with Charlize Theron in Monster and Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood.
It’s easy to focus on Bronson’s protagonist because the rest of the film, while energetic and well-directed, sometimes fails him. Largely as a result of the film’s confined locales, it’s often difficult to determine the film’s timeline. Audiences ignorant of Bronson’s life story (i.e. most Americans) are likely to lose track of how long Bronson has been imprisoned at any particular point in the film. We’re told early on that he spends 34 years in prison, but there are few markers throughout the film indicating exactly when each sequence takes place. Does the film cover all 34 years? Half that time? Just the first four? It’s not a deal breaker (The Shawshank Redemption wasn’t particularly good at this either), but the effect is disorienting and feels unintentional. There’s also a sequence early in the film in which Bronson finds himself unexpectedly committed to a psychiatric hospital, where he finds himself ill-equipped to deal with administrators who are actually interested in curing his behavior rather than punishing him for it. It’s an interesting sequence but it plays too much like an abbreviated One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to feel at home in an otherwise original piece of filmmaking, and its conclusion appears to have been glossed-over in an attempt to get the plot moving again.
So the structure is a bit messy, but Nicolas Winding Refn and Tom Hardy get us through the proceedings with charming aplomb. Bronson is a captivating film about a man held captive by choice. One almost feels guilty for rewarding Charlie Bronson’s troubled life with yet more attention, let alone well-deserved acclaim, but then again he’s lived a life worth immortalizing in film and that very life will keep him from ever even being allowed to see it. So cut the man some slack and let him entertain you… it’s all he ever wanted, you know.
Bronson, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn and written by Brock Norman Brock and Nicolas Winding Refn, stars Tom Hardy. From Magnet Releasing. Opens October 9th, 2009
