Bronson

(England, 2009, 92 mins)

35mm

Executive Producers: Nick Love, Paul Martin, Allan Niblo, James Richardson
Producers: Daniel Hansford, Rupert Preston
Screenwriters: Nicolas Winding Refn, Brock Norman Brock
Cinematographer: Larry Smith
Editor: Matthew Newman
Cast: Tom Hardy, Matt King, James Lance, Amanda Burton

Born Michael Gordon Peterson, the man who would become “Britain’s most violent prisoner” discovered himself in the created persona of Charlie Bronson: an idealist committed to the extremes of personal freedom who needed the opposing pressure of prison to realize his calling. To others, he was simply a dangerous sociopath.

Nicolas Winding Refn’s ecstatic, dramatized portrait of Bronson presents him as a joyful, intentional monkey wrench in the machine of the British penal system. Embodied with total commitment by Tom Hardy (who shed his pretty-boy image by gaining 35 pounds of muscle), Bronson combines devastating physical prowess with an unusually articulate formality, often giving the impression of a high-class waiter ready to explode.

Jailed for stealing roughly $40 in 1974, Bronson, who is currently in solitary confinement at a high-security prison in West Yorkshire, has extended his sentence countless times through violent actions in prison, spending a total of 131 days in freedom since his original incarceration. The cleverness of Refn’s film is to postulate this endless violence as a series of performances, staged by Bronson as a means to express his God-given gifts of a well-built body and an indomitable spirit.

-- Travis Miles

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