London,

Bronson

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Cert: 18

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Dir: Nicolas Winding Refn. Cast: Tom Hardy, Amanda Burton, Matt King, James Lance

 

Description: Unconventional biopic of one of the UK's most notorious and violent inmates of our overcrowded prison system. Charles Bronson has spent 30 of his 34 years behind bars in solitary confinement, and has not been allowed to mix with other prisoners since 1999. Narrated by the central character, the film transports us back to his formative years with his mother, moving from Aberystwyth to Merseyside and later to Luton. Born Michael Peterson, he eventually changes his name at the behest of boxing promoter Paul Daniels, who believes Charles Bronson is a fighting name, "like a movie star."

Country: UK. 2008. 92mins

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Bronson is a hard case to crack

 

Brute force: a beefed-up Hardy as Bronson

Doing the time: Tom Hardy is remarkable as Bronson who has spent 34 years in jail

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My name's Charlie Bronson, and all my life I’ve wanted to be famous.” So says Michael Peterson, renamed by his agent after the Hollywood star and dubbed Britain’s most violent prisoner, at the start of Nicolas Winding Refn’s extraordinary film.

He is played by Tom Hardy and is standing on a stage in make-up. The auditorium seems empty but later a still unseen audience bays the approval he seeks. 

This, then, is not a strict biography of the man who was given seven years for a post office robbery (during which he got away with less than £50 and no one was hurt) and has now, at the age of 56, spent 34 years in prison, some 30 of them in solitary confinement because of his hostage-taking and persistent violence towards warders.

It is much more like an indictment of an archaic prison system in which a clearly dangerous man, who became an artist of some note and the writer of 11 books, was never saved from himself. It is also a highly cinematic, almost free-form study of such a man, based upon Bronson’s life but not necessarily a copy of it.

As a film it is beautifully structured and edited, and impressively shot in dark tones by Larry Smith. Refn, who made the darkly realistic Pusher films, a drugs-crime trilogy, abandons any idea of naturalist cinema, however, in favour of a cabaret-like series of scenes, some almost surreal, illustrating his theme that Bronson was and is “an artist looking for a canvas”, whose search is frequently violent, crazy and erratic.

In this, he is aided by music which includes Verdi’s Nabucco, The Force of Destiny and Attila, Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods and Das Rheingold, Bruckner’s 4th and Puccini’s Madame Butterfly as well as numbers from the Pet Shop Boys and New Order.

But the biggest contribution to this film is the astonishing performance from a bulked-up and almost unrecognisable Hardy, who could hardly be better, never asking for sympathy but able, now and then, to get it from us. He never for a moment allows the tension to drop — but then nor does Refn, who tacitly insists that whatever sins Bronson has committed in prison (and he committed a good many) were more than equalled by those who guarded him in the way of psychological and physical brutality.

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The real life Bronson now claims to be a reformed character and whether or not we believe him, after watching this film we can’t think well of the system that has incarcerated him.

Perhaps the least successful moments of the film are scenes of the few months he spent as a free man in 1988 and 1992. He becomes a bare-knuckle fighter, falls in love with a young woman with whom he has an affair before discovering that she is about to marry someone else, and returns to prison devastated by his loss.

These sequences don’t match the sheer tension of the scenes during which Bronson’s psychopathic personality is constantly made worse by the insensitivity of those who deal with him. Brutal warders, and a stupid governor, are almost caricatured — and the feeling is that they deserve to be.

Some have described Refn’s film as an admix of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and the Australian film Chopper, with a smattering of Hunger as well, and there’s some truth in that. You do get the feeling that its depiction of the hardest of nuts could be appreciated by the wrong audience — a great night out for people like the Kray Brothers. But, with that proviso, it does not glamorise violence. It’s a remarkably bold portrait of a violent man made worse by the system who somehow transforms his worst side into something valuable without much help.

I have no idea about the rights and wrongs of the real Bronson’s case, but it is easy to opine that a man who has won 11 Koestler Awards (for prisoners) for his poetry and art ought somehow to have been reclaimed earlier for the human race. It would, if you judge the matter by this film, have been a difficult task since the man has tended to get his way largely by threats and violence.

But his treatment, first in Rampton (“We’re lion tamers here”) and then in Broadmoor, where he was drugged into virtual zombiedom, was, if the film has any truth at all, tantamount to torture. Perhaps it is all made up — but I wouldn’t bet on it.

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