For whatever reason, audiences have been in love with the American gangster. For as long as there’s been crime, there’s been this excitement to be the bad boy, the person who goes against social norms in order to gain their own susceptible form of capital. Deep down it probably comes from this perverse fascination with being self-made, not existing within the laws of the common man. Who wouldn’t want to experience that, if just for a short time? That is why figures like Al “Scarface” Capone has become a notorious icon in American history.
Going back to the days of James Cagney, he has been presented as this eccentric loose cannon, waiting to blow up anyone who stands in your way. It’s an aspect of cinema that never gets old, and likely why Capone continues to be present in a lot of cinema annually. Even then, there’s almost no chance that anyone has depicted him quite like Josh Trank in his latest film Capone (2020). It’s the least sexy interpretation of this madman, finding him at 48 with a bout of syphilis that threatens to kill him with the mind of a toddler. To put it simply, most people see Capone and want to make an action movie. Trank wants to make a creature feature.
Is Capone (Tom Hardy) even human? In a literal sense, he is. History books can show that he actually lived on this mortal coil. However, the Capone that Trank is obsessed with exists somewhere closer to John Carpenter, whose body is decaying before our eyes. His bowels let loose and his speech begins to growl in incoherent cadences. What we’re watching is a man in his final days, and the truth is that he doesn’t go gently into that good night. He’s going to have to travel through a hallucinatory tunnel just to get there.
There are aspects of the film that perfectly explain why Trank was obsessed with this project – directing, writing, and editing the picture himself – and show a man confident in his vision. It’s by no means pleasant and is designed to be a disgusting, off-putting art piece that wears character study flimsily over a rotting corpse. This is a chance to create a look at history that gives into our sick desires. Speaking as Capone died young, he finds it engrossing to spend time watching the horrors of a man who has lived a life of sin.
He flashes back to key moments, eager to reflect the ways that his decisions lead him to this moment. He was once considered so dangerous that he was imprisoned for life. It was only now, in a state of delirium, that he was allowed to retire to his mansion on the lake and be surrounded by his family. Everyone is trying to find ways to make his life easier, to keep him alive, and restore a meaningful life. But it’s over. Everyone is staring into a hopeless void and, if Capone’s actions are any clue, he probably is better dead.
The film is cruel. There’s never a sympathetic moment for Capone, and it only makes it more challenging to love this film. It’s confrontational, finding Capone holding a conversation with Johnny (Matt Dillon), who is a ghost that haunts him and fills him with paranoid thought. To Capone, everyone is still after him and it makes handling his finances and life post-mortem all the more difficult. Like the opening scene would suggest, he’s willing to assault children if they get in his way. That may be because mentally he is just like them in a grosser and cynical take on Benjamin Button.
His flashbacks are where Trank gets to prove why this project had any value. His memories don’t exist in these clear, attractive frames. Even the Capone of these moments feels like the decrepit contemporary, believing that his appeal can last forever. He is a champion who could never be taken down. As he walks to a stage as a singer croons Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill,” the song feels slowed down, given a David Lynch spin that is meant to be hauntingly beautiful. Other scenes feature him at theaters that transform into these dark bunkers. Even later, there’s another scene where Capone watches a crony stab a suspect at least two dozen times and finds sadistic pleasure in this act.
What is it all saying about Capone as a person? It likely explains why he’s paranoid, unable to be present. Even when he’s at a family dinner, surrounded by people who clearly love him, he feels like he’s been edited in from another movie. He’s imagining his life as it should be, but he can’t quite change himself into what the mob life dictates. He should be clear-throated, able to hold power. At 48, most gangsters still have their wits. All that he has is a mansion, isolated from the world, and waiting to be visited by death.
Another recent gangster movie about the death of a lifestyle was The Irishman (2019). Whereas Capone designed the final days as this harrowing, surreal dive into madness, Martin Scorsese frames Frank Sheeran’s (Robert De Niro) time in a nursing home as a confessional. Over the next 3.5 hours, he will share his story in grand detail. Like Capone, Sheeran will be left alone with nobody but the nursing staff to take care of him. Even if both end the story not entirely remorseful for their actions, Sheeran at least tries to feel human emotion. He is a monster, but a quiet one who has outlived every one of his targets.
What’s incredible is that Sheeran may even come across as more homicidal than Capone. While he doesn’t grab an Uzi and shoot up people at random, Sheeran’s narrative feels indebted to the idea of mortality. The majority of characters are introduced with title cards detailing how they will die. It’s a strange detail, especially given that this is from the perspective of Sheeran as a narrator. Most of these people are insignificant for more than a few minutes, and yet he loves pointing out how everyone around him has died.
Does it matter to him? As his friend Russell Buffalino (Joe Pesci) would put it “It is what it is.” He can’t let business get the best of him. Whereas Capone was a leader looking for respect, Sheeran was a crony that only thought he had it. He thought that loyalty to a dangerous organization would give him happiness, and all it did was draw the world away from him. Whatever friendships he had would go south. Everyone in his family has differing levels of animosity towards him. He is so aware of his loneliness that he ends his story by asking a priest to leave the door of his nursing room home ajar, hoping that his daughter that feared him would come to visit.
Whereas Capone exists in a manic tone that shifts by the minute, The Irishman lingers in an atmosphere that Scorsese has been working on for decades. With a length that qualifies it as an epic, it manages to recall every tool that Scorsese had going back to Goodfellas (1990), pushing aside the style in favor of the characters underneath. It’s when the violence and glory has faded and all that’s left is your conscience rattling inside, wondering why you’re not satisfied. It helps that it works on an implicit level, featuring a cast of gangster movie icons playing roles that they’ve played dozens of times before, but rarely with this much heartache and pain.
De Niro in particular feels like he’s putting a moratorium on this archetype, confessing to the audience. He’s looking for some breakthrough that our obsession with mob violence was somehow worth it. The film deserves every minute and it only becomes starker which moments he draws out as if he’s looking for deeper meaning inside a tragic visit to his friend Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). It reflects how he could’ve changed his mind at any point and changed the outcome of their lives. And yet, his loyalty gave him some sick sense that “it is what it is” and this was fate.
Scorsese manages to make the lingering feel equal parts dreadful and last moments to give character development. There is a pivotal scene involving talk about fish that doesn’t function as a plot progression, and yet it feels essential to understand the mundanity of the moments leading up to the great shift. It shows a life that Sheeran can never have with his own daughter, of being able to have candid and warm conversations about responsibility. Again, it also reflects how Sheeran could’ve changed his mind at any time and realized that he was only hurting people, literally and figuratively.
To be fair, Trank doesn’t have a career yet of Scorsese. He isn’t creating a film that draws from elements of decades of being gangster movie’s greatest contributor. He doesn’t have the insight that would make Capone into this masterful and sympathetic portrait of a monster. It’s likely why he’s more interested in just making a monster movie, where the world collapses on him with overwhelming violence and discomfort. If The Irishman is the gangster movie to end all gangster movies, then Capone exists like a bloated corpse stalking the world. It isn’t subtle, choosing to be more of a stylistic piece than a story that gets to any deeper meaning.
It could also be that Trank is open about his manic depression and his feeling that his career has been disappointing up to this point. What Capone does is revive a fatalistic career by allowing him to play with his craft, getting to try out so many ideas. For the first time, he wasn’t concerned about what the world thought. This was his shameless vision of grotesque curios that meant something to him. It’s unclear what it meant, but the impressionistic quality makes one more perplexed by why he wanted to make it. Most artists have this abstract film inside of them and they need to make them. It may not do much for their career, but it’s necessary. It’s almost like it’s not for the viewer. It’s for him, to know that he’s capable of pushing himself further than he ever thought.
Scorsese, meanwhile, has said everything that he needs to say. With one of the most acclaimed careers in film history, this feels like a personal farewell to a genre that has served him well. Where Trank is at the start of his style, this is Scorsese at the end of it, reflecting every element at its tightest and most realized. Every small piece of nuance is perfectly placed. The Irishman is a film that comes from decades of experience and personal trials and errors. It’s able to find sympathy for a man who probably doesn’t deserve it. It’s the quintessential antihero in his entire career, if just because he feels the most real, devoid of any fantasy.
Capone meanwhile can’t help but feel youthful. From the fact that Capone was 48 and about to die with an infantile brain, it has this quality to it that lacks confidence. It’s trying to find a way to cope with potential death, and it’s not going well. This is chaos and finds ideas that are more symbolic than fruitful, forcing a deconstruction of a man that relies on visceral impulse. Capone doesn’t have a breakthrough on par with Sheeran, even if both don’t really learn from them. The difference is that Capone inspires him to pick up an Uzi while The Irishman sits alone with his thoughts. Capone isn’t ready to be alone. It would be too depressing and largely inessential to how the story is told.
In the past two years, there have been two films about the death of the gangster, and each reflects a different side to this argument. The Irishman is bound to be a classic that serves as a dissertation on what this culture does to us internally. It’s how we struggle to root for characters and how they have to come to terms with their own personal demons. Meanwhile, Capone is external, presenting an even more unique take that is pretty damning of a figure who is often given a sexier treatment. Both feel like ambitious interpretations and reflect filmmakers on opposite ends of the age spectrum. They each see the world differently, and it’s rarely clearer than here when they try to interpret history through their own lens.
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