Fantastic Four director Josh Trank has created a strange, bitter-flavoured account of the celebrated mafioso in terminal decline in Florida
Josh Trank is the film-maker who took flight in 2012 with his brilliant superhero-nerd fantasy Chronicle, but then found the wind beneath his wings vanish with his disappointing Fantastic Four movie just three years later, which crashed acrimoniously to earth. Now he is back with this gloomy, distinctively grandiose but very confident study of a gangster legend in terminal decline in the
Florida sun, basking in his own cantankerous scorn like one of the gators in the lake he overlooks. Trank has written, directed and edited it.
Tom Hardy stars as Al Capone, referred to by his family as “Fonzo” (from his first name Alphonse). It is 1947, and he has just been released from
prison after ten years, due to ill health having suffered a stroke. He is allowed to live under house arrest, bugged from afar by
FBI men, and surrounded by watchful, slightly resentful family members – although his wife Mae (Linda Cardellini) seems genuinely still to care for him. He is only in his late 40s, but seems at least 20 years older than that. The film spans one year, bounded by two
Thanksgiving dinners, in the course of which Capone’s own physical and mental state declines, along with his finances. His estate is progressively denuded of its furniture, expensive artworks and statues, which happens in chilling parallel with Capone’s mental befuddlement.