Movie Review: Bronson

LITTLE ROCK — A stylized portrait of a criminal famous in his native Britain as perhaps the most violent man in Her Majesty’s prison system, Bronson serves primarily as a showcase for Tom Hardy’s undeniably brilliant performance. As the titular “Charles Bronson,” the nom de guerre assumed by Michael Peterson, a man who’s spent more than 30 years behind bars (mostly in solitary confinement), Hardy frets and rages and struts, addressing the audience with an abrupt directness that suggests a very real - and very black - madness.

We hope it’s all acting. In any case, Hardy is all sinew and suppressed rage, with a smile as cold as shaving steel that he flashes at the camera like a suddenly unconcealed weapon. Hardy is riveting, and his command of our attention is total.

The film is violent, but it eschews the glamorized hard violence of Tarantino (and his antecedents and imitators) in favor of a stylized, theatrical look that often has Hardy addressing the audience from an isolating spotlight.

There’s an obvious resonance between the way Hardy, with his naked head and rasping voice, has pursued (and seems to have captured) Peterson and the way Peterson channels the Death Wish actor who was his idol. It’s only in retrospect that we begin to understand what Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn is doing has less to do with relating Peterson’s history than with the process by which Peterson willed himself into Bronson.

Like any number of reality show candidates, Peterson wanted to be famous, but having no discernible talents, the only way he could see to accomplish his goal was to rob a post office with a sawed-off shotgun.

“I had a calling,” he says at the beginning of the film. “I just didn’t know what as.”

And his vocation, the film suggests, wasn’t as a master criminal - how masterful could he be if he’s been confined for two-thirds of his life? - but as a kind of performance artist. Peterson’s life’s work was creating the character Bronson.

Aside from Hardy’s ferocious performance, there may be little to recommend Bronson - one doubts the real Peterson (seen briefly here in some chilling news footage) is anything like the Sartrean saint Hardy portrays here. But this is a performance - and an actor - that can not be denied.