BRONSON
Charles Bronson (born Michael Peterson) is the most famous incarcerated, living criminal in the United Kingdom. He has published 11 books on poetry and other subjects including one entitled Solitary Fitness, which details his obsessive small cell fitness routine. He is also an artist. He’s the sort of contemporary celebrity that is famous because our current forms of media are so expansive and insatiable. There’s just something weird about the superstar criminal. He is not the arrogant and worldy provocateur of the past, like Jacques Mesrine, the French bank-robber who taunted authorities as he continually broke out of prison until he was gunned down in the streets. One imagines that in times past, Bronson would either have been killed early on, or would have died away silently, ego crushed under a pile of rocks.
This is not so say the story, as Nicolas Winding Refn, is not interesting to the extent that it seems to have little to offer in the way of explanation for Bronson’s incessant brutality. Apparently he has showed no signs of violence for the past seven years, but those years are not the subject of this film: it’s everything that came before and that means the film is a relentless assault on the senses. This is by no means an indictment, rather a warning: it’s somewhat hard to take, as much as it does have the sort of rubbernecking the car accident appeal.
Bronson/Peterson was born in 1952 in Wales and seemed to have always been a discipline problem despite the fact that his mum and dad seemed to be characteristically repressed members of the British working class. His prison stints began with a bungled armed robbery and, as it stands, he has spent a total of 34 years in prison, 30 in solitary. The problem, as the film tells it, is that Bronson is simply unmanageable, he loves to fight. In the film we see him repeatedly grease himself up so that when the guards come to discipline him, he gleefully slips and slides through their hands. In a brief period on the outside, he even begins a fighting career. Along the way he is passed around various facilities including a mental hospital where he is drugged and otherwise abused but to no end: they can’t crack the mystery of his personality disorder either.
Tom Hardy who inhabits this character gives the sort of fearless and unrelenting performance that probably does match the legend of this criminal. I respected and enjoyed it...for awhile. But it became too much noise, too much screaming, too much brutality. I guess the film and the man underscores the point that prison, and we all understand this, makes everyone involved more brutal and less fit for human interaction. But that’s it, there is no call to action in the film. In the end, it’s mostly about Bronson and his unique, “extraordinary personality”, a sort of caged genius, who in an age of narcissistic self-obsession has found his ticket to fame and glory.
Bronson opens October 16, 2009.
Written and directed by Nicolas Winding Refn; produced by Rupert Preston and Danny Hansford. Released by Magnet. Running time: 92 minutes.
With: Tom Hardy (Michael Peterson/Charles Bronson); Matt King (Paul Daniels); Amanda Burton (Mum) and James Lance (Art Teacher.)
