Why would someone actively try to spend 30 years in solitary confinement? That is not something you will find out while watching Bronson, the biopic of Britain’s most violent prisoner. The director Nicolas Winding Refn has chosen to ignore the ‘why’ and focus on the ‘how’ of the situation in this highly stylised film. This is A Clockwork Orange with all that pesky parable removed.
The story of Charles Bronson (real name Michael Peterson) is a simple one. He went to prison at 22 and stayed there through his continual protests, beatings and hostage taking, all carried out for seemingly no reason. The film shows various scenes from these explosions of rage and weirdness. We follow Charles from prison, to a mental institution, to the outside world, and back to prison again.
Ultraviolence and contrivances take up the space left by this lack of narrative. The beatings are designed to look brutal but always cool, accompanied by achingly beautiful classical tracks (a rather obvious use of a device from Burgess and Kubrick’s work that is repeated too many times). This is one of those films where everyone speaks in a strange, stilted way, as if they’ve been heavily sedated or are Tony Blair. Naturalistic it ain’t.
Tom Hardy’s unnerving central performance just about makes it all work. He really goes for it, spending most of the film naked and writhing in dirt, or walking with mad eyes and the stiff gait of a Sergeant Major. Hardy is sure to be a star if he can keep getting the parts.
Bronson is relentlessly horrible and pointless. But that’s our Charlie! Not a great film, then, but perhaps a fitting one considering its subject matter.
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