Film Review: Bronson

Achieving Notoriety

“My name’s Charles Bronson and all my life I’ve wanted to be famous. I knew I was made for better things, I just didn’t know what as”

Unlike the other films in the recent spate of biopics, Bronson is not a linear consideration of its subject’s life. Bronson is more concerned with capturing the essence of the man, rather than the truth. Style over substance seems to be the motto for both the man’s life and the film. Charles Bronson’s claim to fame is his notoriety in British tabloids. Labelled as the most violent criminal in Britain, he has spent more than 34 yrs in jail, 30 of them in solitary confinement. This is not the most promising premise for a film, the title character having spent a large proportion of his life completely alone in a small box. However it is credit to everyone involved in Bronson, that the film sustains the interest of the audience by approaching the biopic from a very skewed, but innovative angle.

Visually the film exceeds your usual cinema experience. Highly stylized shots displaying Bronson’s predilection for violence are both beautiful and disturbing. The motif of blacks and reds spatter the screen, mixing ultra-violence with comedy, producing both shock and laughter from the audience. These standout images are accompanied by a fantastic soundtrack, enticing the audience to watch scenes we would be horrified to see play out in real life. The found soundtrack is used to full effect, especially during a fight scene which is punctuated by the beats of an 80s dance hit, creating an arresting staccato. Director, Nicholas Winding Refn pays homage to Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange in more ways than simply mixing violence and classical music. Reyn is reliant on having an audience that is acclimatised to a certain level of stylised violence. The groundwork has been laid by directors like Kubrick and Tarratino, who have educated the modern audience in this visual aesthetic, essentially making a film like Bronson possible.

Whilst the visuals for Bronson are impressive, it is the theme of reinvention, which permeates the film, that makes it fascinating. Michael Peterson recreated himself becoming Charles Bronson, going from a petty criminal given seven years for stealing £26.18, into a notorious prison demi-god. This transformation feeds into the modern craving for recognition, fifteen minutes of fame. The prisoner Charles Bronson wrote an autobiography, which is where Brock Norman Brock takes up his story for the Bronson script. Thus another layer of invention is added to Charles Bronson- the prisoner becomes a movie star.

Tom Hardy’s physical transformation into Charles Bronson is nothing short of incredible. Gaining 2 stone of muscle, he is an intimidating screen presence even before he opens his mouth. Refn uses Hardy’s body brilliantly, keeping him as unclothed as possible. Hardy doesn’t play the role, he inhabits it.  There has been a definite choice not to imitate the man; Hardy assumes Bronson’s public persona, which exists in the British psyche. Hardy has done such a good job he is unrecognisable; he becomes the man constantly on the tittering edge of a psychotic rage, just as likely to make you a cup of tea as beat the shit out of you.

Charles Bronson is transplanted for large parts of the film from his cell and onto the stage, in front of the audience he seems to crave. The film puts him into a vaudevillian theatre, narrating his own story to a blacked out, barely visible, audience. Here he could have become the ultimate unreliable narrator.  Unfortunately this is where the film falls short. Happy to push the boundaries visually, the film fails to live up to the challenges it poses to the narrative structure. Presenting Bronson as a jester, with a powdered white face and a painted smile, gives him yet another mask to hide behind. Here, style wins out over substance.

Refn is not afraid to push the conventions of biopics and the sensibilities of his audience, but he shies away from examining beyond the superficial. Happy to explore Bronson’s rage and aggression in all its glory, it is only at the end of the film that the director considers the gap between Bronson’s imagined life and reality. Shot in an oppressive red tint, we see the powerful man shut up in a small cage. This point needed to come half-way through the film, not at the end. From this point the film could have explored the notion of the unreliable narrator and perhaps considered why this seemingly intelligent, ambitious and charming man feels/felt unable to exist in society.

The film, however never sets out to give us anything resembling reality. This isn’t a film about Michael Peterson; it is not really even about Charles Bronson, the celebrity prisoner. It is about what we imagine this man to be. Instead of revealing Bronson, the film ultimately further mystifies him.

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn

Cast: Tom Hardy, Matt King, James Lance, Juliet Oldfield

BRONSON is set to next screen at the Melbourne International Film Festival which will be held from July 24 to August 9, 2009 where the director Nicolas Winding Refn (The Pusher trilogy) will present his film as a guest of MIFF.

Australian Release Date is 6^th August

Watch the trailer …