The right amount of Capone

Josh Trank's Capone didn't do much for me, as you know from this post, but what it did do is whet my appetite to revisit for the first time in yonks (to use the Australian phraseology) one of my favorite movies as a teenager, Brian de Palma's The Untouchables.

This is the amount of Al Capone we need.

Robert De Niro appears on screen for less than 15 minutes of a two-hour movie, but you know what? Each and every one of his scenes is memorable.

There's the opening scene, where he talks about crime in Chicago while getting a shave, and you wonder if the barber nicking his neck with his razor is going to be cause for the man to be immediately killed.

There's the famous baseball bat scene, where he murders a capo who disappointed him in front of all the other capos, to send a message to them all to stay in line, to "play for the team."

There's the scene where he talks about wanting Elliot Ness and his family dead, and keeps hitting the word "dead" so you know how serious he is.

There's the scene where both parties have to be held back on a staircase so Ness and he don't get into a fist fight with each other.

There's the scene where he's sitting at the opera and gets a big grin on his face upon learning that one of the untouchables has been taken out.

There's the scene where he starts punching his lawyer during his trial when the lawyer changes his plea from not guilty to guilty.

And there are no more scenes.

This is a stark contrast with Capone, where Tom Hardy is on screen for nearly every damn shot of the entire movie, excepting for a very few brief scenes between federal agents discussing their surveillance of him.

Now, the performances these actors are giving is one of the things that makes the contrast so stark. In The Untouchables, it's the great Robert De Niro, who can make a role iconic just by playing it. Notably, he doesn't strain for some kind of absurd accent. He just plays Robert De Niro, and if you think that's a criticism, have you ever seen a Robert De Niro movie? He's menacing without even making a specific effort to be, with just a look from those steely eyes. He leaves us wanting more.

Tom Hardy's performance in Capone is nothing but accent. Joe Morgenstern, in a review tabulated to equal a rating of 10 on Metacritic, describes him as "growling in a voice that evokes Marlon Brando, Lionel Stander and Stephen Hawking's synthesizer." (This is a hilarious description even though I don't know who Lionel Stander is.) In my previous post I suggested Hardy should win an award for most acting. He's all flinches and ticks and drools. You know the type of performance I mean, the type that makes you want way, way less. (In another review, which I can't seem to locate at the moment, the critic referred to him as showing a curious disregard for the normal binaries of good vs. bad acting.)

The real problem, though, is that by spending so much time with Capone in Capone -- and Trank's artistic choices don't help -- it's clear we are meant to sympathize with this man on some level, almost like it's a tragedy that he's lost his physical and mental faculties from neuro-syphilis. The film sets the tone by opening on a scene of Capone playing hide and seek with his grandchildren, in which he appears loveable and easygoing. I actually found this to be the film's most effective scene, as it overturns our expectations -- Capone is shown carrying a blunt instrument through his silent mansion, as though he's paranoid about an intruder trying to kill him, only for it to be revealed that he's playing the role of villain in a game with these children. However well it works on a narrative level, it lays the groundwork for us to see this monster as human.

In The Untouchables, it's clear Capone is a monster in every moment. He demonstrates nothing but malevolence, which I think is correct. Oh, I'm sure Al Capone loved his family and maybe helped an old lady across the street once or twice. But I think it's correct that our takeaway should be that this man is evil and was responsible for a great many ruined lives, while not paying nearly the price he deserved to pay for his crimes. In Capone, there's a line of dialogue where one of the feds says "What's the difference between Al Capone and Adolf Hitler? Adolf Hitler is dead." And while that line is potentially problematic in some respects, comparing ethnicity-based genocide to a much smaller scale mass murder driven purely by business interests, it does indicate the extent to which people at the time considered Capone a menace.

Capone as a movie, though, does not make us believe it.

The Untouchables as a movie was not as beloved to me in 2020 as it was in 1987, though it certainly didn't suffer the same kind of hit in my affections as another Kevin Costner movie I recently rewatched, Field of Dreams. I still like this movie quite a bit and really enjoyed watching it, but it probably doesn't quite deserve the five stars I had given it on Letterboxd as a retroactive estimation of my affections.