Tom Hardy is Al Capone as we’ve never seen him before

Tom Hardy in the 2020 film Capone

Any Tom Hardy movie starts at five stars and goes up or down from there. It would be fascinating to be a fly on the kitchen wall when the English actor is offered a role, especially one such as this that involves a real life character who has been played by everyone from Edward G. Robinson to Paul Muni to Rod Steiger to Jason Robards to Ben Gazzara to F. Murray Abraham to Robert DeNiro to (loosely) Al Pacino.

I doubt he thinks he will do a better Al Capone, but I bet he believes he will do a different one. That is what he delivers, in spades, in Capon e, written and directed by Josh Trank (previous film Fantastic Four), which covers not Alphonse Capone’s blood-spattered career as a Prohibition era bootlegger and gangster but the final 12 months of his short life.

This is the Capone we see: a 48-year-old man in adult diapers, chewing on a fat carrot, which have replaced cigars on doctor’s orders, spraying a gold Tommy gun at anyone in sight on his sprawling, Roman-themed estate in Florida.

This, too, is the Capone we see: a man so engrossed in The Wizard of Oz that he stands in front of his home theatre screen and sings along with Bert Lahr the Cowardly Lion. This singalong scene, like much of the 103-minute film, is superbly shot (cinematographer Peter Deming, whose credits include David Lynch’s Mullholland Drive).

The script and direction are strong, too, but at the end of the day this is all about the remarkable chameleon Tom Hardy.

He is unmissable in every scene. Interestingly he is an actor who seems to like hiding his own face. He did so in the 2012 Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises, in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), in Dunkirk (2017) and Venom (2018).

Here, we see more of him, but there’s still the mask: the deep scars on the left cheek, the pock-marked skin on the rest of the face, the cigars and then the carrots. The actor lurks behind all of this and the result is powerful.

Matt Dillon has an important supporting role, as a mobster who went wrong with Fonz, as Capone is known throughout. Kyle McLachlan is good as the accommodating doctor and Linda Cardellini is excellent as Capone’s wife, Mae, who is now dealing with an angry baby, or so it would seem.

This Capone is the one who has served his time in jail for tax evasion and is now living, almost alone, at his mansion, suffering the physical and mental degradations of untreated neurosyphilis. Hence the nappies.

However, as with the Australian horror movie I reviewed last week, Relic, there’s a question as to how much of Capone’s dementia is real and how much is made up, and to whether what we see on screen is happening or just in Capone’s mind.

When the doctor says, “Do you know who I am?”, Fonz drawls, “J. Edgar Hoover”, and it sounds like he’s not confused, but joking.

A young FBI agent does think he is making it up. He believes the old crook is hiding ten million in ill-gotten gains. The scene where he interviews Capone is priceless. If Hardy is method acting in it, I tip my cigar to him.

Judging from the reviews I have read I am in a small minority in thinking this a four-star film. So I suggest potential viewers read a few reviews before commiting. It does seem to me that a lot of people are disappointed that it’s not about a gangster, like Pacino’s superb Scarface (1993).

Yet that is what I like about it. It’s a movie about a dying man trying not to die and looking back over his life with regret. There were moments I felt sorry for him, which is another, unexpected tribute to Hardy’s acting.