Wow. I’m not even sure how to describe this psychedelic circus ride of a biopic about Michael Peterson (aka Charles Bronson, his “fighting name”), a violent sociopath who hurls himself into an anarchic “mission of madness” to become something of a national celebrity–a penal performance artist whose numerous hostage incidents have led him to be proclaimed Britain’s most violent prisoner ever. Incarcerated for armed robbery at age twenty-two in 1974, Peterson, at the time of the film’s release, had served thirty-four years behind bars (thirty of those years in solitary confinement). He’s still locked up and I think that’s probably a good thing.
Directed by Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, Bronson is a highly stylized, bloody farce of movie. It will certainly not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I found it thrilling. The use of classical music in key moments is a direct nod to Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (and a number of critics have made that comparison), but I was also reminded of Raging Bull (albeit a bizarro, sideways take on Scorsese’s masterpiece as if it had been reimagined by Jean Genet and directed by Salvador Dali). Ultimately, the film is worth a look due to the mesmerizing performance of Tom Hardy in the central role. Refn eschews the sociological and psychological for something that resembles a Brechtian music hall fantasia of masculinity as pure chaotic impulse, and Hardy pushes at the limits of anything and everything an actor can do in front of the camera. The results are bold and audacious. The performance alone demands attention, but Refn, who directed the Pusher films, is also at top form. I’ll be curious to read what others have to say.
I’ll say more tomorrow or soon thereafter, but just finished, and shit yeah. Hardy’s amazing. And I was fascinated by the purposelessness of Bronson’s rage, a kind of pure aesthetic pleasure in brutality…. hmmm…I want to think about that more. Damn good film.
Yeah, it took my breath away. I’ll look forward to your response.
I haven’t come up with anything coherent or particularly smart, but after watching–and being even more blown away by–Steve McQueen’s Hunger, I have been circling around the way both of these films approach a highly-stylized aesthetic around violence.
Bronson is clearly performative, as is Bronson/Peterson, the film’s referent. But the film–even as it sets up a literal stage, liberally applies greasepaint and bright red blood, taunts and struts–is not merely spectacle. While undoubtedly concerned with aesthetics, it does not (in that reductive connotation) aestheticize the violence.
Or the man: Refn and Hardy produce a Bronson that is often funny, often scary, but rarely seductive. Take, for instance, the way Bronson interacts with others, the young woman he thinks he loves, or the swishy fellow ex-con who hires him to “box” gypsies: Peterson stares blankly (dull-eyed and head cocked slightly to the side, almost birdlike) at them until he begins to get a handle on either what they want from him or what he might want from them. And then his face suddenly shifts, as if he’s put on the right mask: rage, smile, affection, even sadness.
The film’s pointed disinterest in a psychological or sociological etiology puts the viewer in the awkward space of having to deal with these performances, almost staring blankly, trying to figure out what the film wants or what we might want from it. (And this is I think what I mean when I say it doesn’t aestheticize the violence: the film doesn’t deploy an erotics of visual sensation, meant to please the viewer–its visual dynamics avoid the typical paths to affect, whether revulsion/horror or the pleasurable kick of well-choreographed mayhem.) Clearly Bronson (and Bronson) are hectoring us, prancing at us, trying to get… something… out of us. But what?
In the last scenes, Bronson takes yet another hostage (a well-meaning art teacher), paints his naked body black with oil, draws a face onto the teacher’s face, struts and prances and listens to music and sings…. and then says, right, he’s had enough, calls in the guard for a pointless brutal bare-knuckle beating.
Make of it what you will.
I’m taken by Jeff’s notion of the “music hall fantasia of masculinity.” I’d love to hear more. But I myself got caught up in a film trying to capture that perfect estrangement of an aesthetic experience radically dissociated from our attempts to ground it in a real, and ethical, world.
(Whereas Hunger is similarly challenging, but has I think a more focused concern for the relationship between the body, violence, politics, ethics, and aesthetics…. But I’m even less coherent about that film, right now, so it’ll have to wait.)