Review: Bronson (3/5)

Bronson
(Nicolas Winding Refn):
Tom Hardy, Hugh Ross, Juliet Oldfield.
Running time: 92 minutes (18)

This biopic from Pusher trilogy director Nicolas Winding Refn is a study of Charles Bronson – not the Hollywood star of Death Wish, but the tabloid star famous for being Britain’s ‘most violent prisoner’. Bronson was sent down in 1974 for armed robbery and has spent virtually every year since in solitary confinement. So in a sense, Refn is working within a vacuum. He makes good with what he’s got but it’s not enough. The film thrives off a primal madness. Tom Hardy’s Bronson is a beefcake brawler and snarling menace. He takes hostages in prison and makes rooftop protests. But most of the time, he just pummels prison guards. The film develops an amusing motif of Bronson stripping naked in readiness for violence, a suggestion his aggression is perverse, almost sexual. Hardy is terrific. He threatens us to engage with him, switching between mock theatrical soliloquy and all-out nutter. The cinematographer is Larry Smith, who shot Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and he brings a Kubrickian sense of space with languorous and immaculate tracking shots. There is one aplomb sequence within an asylum that highlights just how close to sanity Bronson really is. Refn takes his cues from Andrew Dominik’s Chopper and makes another case for a charming sociopath. It’s packed with stylistic violence, but is devoid of dramatic conflict. Bronson seems to drift through time, as unknowable as a cipher.