'Capone,' Josh Trank, and the myth of the difficult genius
No Content for Old Men
with Matt Craig
In this week's newsletter: I went a little overboard in my review of Capone, turning it into a full-on breakdown of the confusing but fascinating career of director Josh Trank. Hope you read it, even though it's longer than normal. Then the usual recommendations for "something new, something old and something to stream." And lastly in this week's "Trailer Watch," our first look at Judd Apatow's "The King of Staten Island," which is out on VOD in a couple weeks.
Word Count: 1,913 words
Approximate Reading Time: 8 minutes
Capone
On the Uncompromising Arrogance of Josh Trank
A million words could be written -- and they no doubt have -- about the utterly fascinating career of Tom Hardy. Never in the history of Hollywood has a movie star of his wattage been so committed to repeatedly transforming himself into someone else, even (and especially) if that means humiliating himself in the process.
In the case of Capone, that means burying himself under copious layers of makeup, adopting a voice that one character accurately describes as a "dying horse," and pooping his pants...twice.
Hardy is the reason we're even talking about this unfortunately terrible movie, honestly the reason it exists in the first place (he has not-so-secretly yearned to play Al Capone for years). But Capone is not a Tom Hardy movie. It's a Josh Trank movie, written, directed and edited. And somehow, that is even more interesting.
Interpreted generously, Trank has had the career trajectory of an Icarus. He burst onto the scene in 2012 with Chronicle, a found footage superhero drama that grossed a remarkable $126 million on a $12 million budget while garnering rapturous reviews, minting the 26-year-old director as one of the industry's new golden boys. Immediately he was handed the reigns to a rebooted Fantastic Four franchise and a Star Wars standalone movie, and almost as quickly, he self-destructed both in a tornado of tabloid headlines.
This movie was billed as his return to form, a character study of the infamous Al Capone in the late stages of his life, released from prison but under surveillance, racked with guilt and hiding a buried treasure. A promising premise, especially with Hardy attached to play the lead.
Instead, the final product is a plotless, pointless ramble through the deteriorating mind of a near-death dementia patient. That guilt? He doesn't remember. That treasure? He doesn't remember where it is. Potential plot lines enter and then amount to nothing, and all the beautifully composed shots and sound design in the world would not make up for story points like Capone forgetting his wife's face, having a stroke, falling, peeing his pants, and yes, pooping them too...twice, as Trank is quite eager to point out in numerous interviews.
He is quite proud of the movie, a pure distillation of his auteurist vision. He's given interviews about it to the New York Times, Esquire, Vanity Fair, Hollywood Reporter, IndieWire, Polygon, Variety, Entertainment Weekly, and screenrant.com. I'm almost disappointed I didn't land one for my newsletter.
His goal, he has said, is to "deconstruct the toxic masculinity" of the legendary gangster, hoping to elicit some visceral reactions by, I guess, making the movie as inaccessible and uninteresting as possible.
"The way I like to put it is, the movie itself has dementia. That was the mantra on-set when we were making the movie," Trank told Esquire.
Who the hell wants to see a movie with brain damage? Apparently, not too many people. As of writing, the movie has a Rotten Tomatoes score in the 30s and an Audience Score in the 40s.
In response, Trank produced this even more infuriating quote for Indiewire: "With the worst reviews of this movie, they do feel like a mirror, but in a way that doesn’t make me feel ashamed...It just makes me feel like I’m on the right track with this."
The smugness to call terrible reviews "progress," after using $20 million of other people's money to fund what is ostensibly an experimental art project, is inconceivable to me.
So I spent a substantial amount of time this week going down the rabbit hole of Josh Trank, whom I will attempt to approach with some measure of empathy.
After all, imagine being 26 years old and receiving a review from Roger Ebert, the most influential film critic to ever live, that said, “Sometimes a movie arrives out of the blue that announces the arrival of considerable new talents." Humility would be difficult. In his own words, he went from "sleeping on friends’ couches to meeting with people like Tom Cruise at his house and being told by everybody that you’re a genius." That would be a lot of pressure to live up to. Imagine going from scraping together a few bucks for your first little indie to being asked to build the foundational pillars of billion dollar corporations.
Still, the warning signs were there that Trank believed his own hype. He attempted to retcon auteur credit for Chronicle's writing and editing (he did neither), then complained that what people enjoyed about it was the lighter, more fun elements (which were almost certainly the work of screenwriter Max Landis). "A lot of what people were reviewing were the ideas of getting cool superpowers when you’re a teenager, the things I was driven to make that movie [about] were the themes of child abuse, bullying, all of the uncomfortable, painful moments that drove Dane DeHaan’s character into a violent, dangerous place. That’s the kind of stuff I thought about, and that’s what drove me every single day," he said in the same IndieWire piece. When Landis tried to get a Chronicle sequel off the ground, Trank by his own admission torpedoed the project lest he be considered derivative.
Perhaps some due diligence on the part of Fox and LucasFilm could have deduced that the purveyor of child abuse and bullying was not right to create mass entertainment properties. But this was a specific time in the industry when the fashionable thing to do was snatch up promising indie directors to work within the massive franchise system: Colin Treverrow, Gareth Edwards, Ryan Coogler, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (to mixed results).
Studio execs soon realized their mistake. Trank's co-writer for Fantastic Four, Jeremy Slater, told Polygon that he suggested the recently-released Avengers should be the template for the script. "That’s what audiences want to see!” Slater said. “And Josh just f-----g hated every second of it.” Slater says he produced 18 drafts, nearly 2,000 pages of material.
So the story goes, clouded as it might be by a mountain of NDAs, that Trank shot his version of a Fantastic Four movie, centered around body horror (fun!), which the studio took one look at and ordered extensive reshoots. Trank, a singular genius in his own mind, did not play nice. Stories started showing up saying he got into heated arguments with star Miles Teller, that he was reclusive, that his dogs did $100,000 in damage to a set. The studio wrestled away more and more control, until on the night before the movie was to be released Trank went nuclear. He tweeted-then-deleted his uncompromising auteur manifesto: “A year ago I had a fantastic version of this, and it would’ve recieved [sic] great reviews. You’ll probably never see it. That’s reality though.”
Bad move. The movie tanked, opening to $26 million on a $120 million budget, and got destroyed by critics (9% on Rotten Tomatoes, at last check). Any chance for sequels was dead. Soon after, he quit the Star Wars project to avoid being fired.
So a young punk gets humbled. That should've been the end of the story.
Josh Trank's cautionary tale should've been relegated to the annals of history, and maybe in 25 years we get a look-back that includes a quote like this one, which instead was given to the New York Times this week: "I’m so glad that I did Fantastic Four, and I’m so glad that it turned out to be a disaster because I learned so much about myself ... If it had just been a big success, like Chronicle times 20, who knows if I would be this self-aware? Maybe I’d just be living in a bubble of success, like a lot of people that exist out there.”
The way he talks now reflects countless hours of therapy. He went from zero to hero back to zero, started chain-smoking and gained 60 pounds and feeling worthless. He got placed in the fabled "director's jail," unable to do the thing he loved. Again, I can sympathize.
The truly baffling part for me is what happens next. Based on what we've covered so far, Trank's audacity to compare his vegetal-state suffering to the final year of Al Capone's life, to compare Alcatraz to "director's jail," should come as no surprise. That he writes a spec script about it doesn't bother me either.
But an insistence on directing the project and demanding final cut privileges displays an almost unfathomable level of self-belief. By this point, Trank had established himself as a filmmaker with, at best, fringe interests. In the name of artistic integrity, he seems to thumb his nose at anything that could be considered appealing to viewers, a real life version of Ethan Hawke's character in Reality Bites.
You want an Al Capone movie? He'll make one without action or bootlegging or organized crime or Chicago or anything else you want out of it. In fact, the original title was "Fonzo," which is the name Hardy's character goes by throughout the movie. We don't even get to call him Al Capone.
Somehow, still, he got his wish. Tom Hardy threw his weight behind the project. Someone raised $20 million to make the thing (most of which reportedly comes from overseas and is fueled by the presence of Hardy). It all speaks to Hollywood's long-held belief in the mystical power of a difficult genius.
Even after Trank showed his cut of "Fonzo" to major distributors in 2018, and every single one of them passed, causing the producers to hire another editor to find a more palatable version...even then, Trank was able to fight them off and sell his version to distributor Vertical Entertainment, which changed the name to Capone and made it the most important new release (for adults) of the coronavirus quarantine up to this point.
The maddening thing is the obvious level of craftsmanship in the movie. Trank knows how to compose shots, block actors and use light and sound at a high level. But with no story on the surface and even less depth underneath, it amounts to nothing. That doesn't stop it from taking itself seriously. Especially in earnestly-delivered lines of dialogue like, "you know the difference between Al Capone and Hitler? Hitler's dead." (Uh...no.)
The thing Trank needs most clearly is a strong collaborative team around him, which seems to be the one thing he cannot accept. In a different world, that stubbornness might keep someone from getting work. "I think maybe I’m still in a version of movie jail,” he told IndieWire, adding, "This is the kind of movie that you make in movie jail.” With a $20 million budget and Tom Hardy in the lead, I beg to differ. People would murder their firstborn to make a movie with $5 million and the third kid from "Stranger Things."
Trank is not most people. He's the person who still gets asked, by the New York Times no less, if he'd consider helming another blockbuster, and answers with a straight face:
"Sure. With Capone, I wrote it, I directed it, and I edited it. It’s a pure representation of exactly who I am as a filmmaker. If studio X or producer X takes Chronicle and Capone into account, and they think to themselves for whatever reason that material they have fits in alignment with the kind of weird, dark, idiosyncratic things that I’m compelled to be part of, then by all means, of course, I’d be interested."
All hail the confidence and delusion of a difficult genius, Josh Trank.
But Capone, you can skip.
Streaming Suggestions!
Something New
How to Build a Girl (VOD): Billed as Almost Famous-meets-Booksmart -- one of which is my favorite movie of all time and the other one of my favorites of last year -- I jumped all over this Beanie Feldstein coming of age story that came out on digital this week. Feldstein plays a high schooler from Wolverhampton who creates a second identity as a rock n' roll critic. It's fun, admittedly quite formulaic and predictable, definitely trite, but fun. It wants to be more profound about feminism than it is, but did I mention it was fun? We need fun these days.
Extraction (Netflix): I left this movie off my 2020 roundup last week, but had to circle back when I learned this is by far the most viewed movie of the quarantine. According to Netflix (and their questionable numbers), some 90 million people watched at least a couple minutes of this Chris Hemsworth action adventure. My expectations were at rock bottom, and this movie surpassed them well into the mediocrity zone. The plot isn't any less shabby or thin than most other action movies, and there's a truly transcendent action scene that was edited so that it looks like a continuous 13-minute tracking shot. Even if you don't watch the movie, I'd watch that sequence (it starts around the 35-minute mark).
Something Old
Sunset Boulevard (1950, Amazon Prime): This week I was buzzing through the new Netflix show "Hollywood," and it got me craving a movie from the golden era. Once I found this classic was streaming, I revisited. Let me tell you, some movies just stand the test of time. This thing is timeless. The story of a struggling screenwriter's car breaking down at the mansion of a former silent movies star, slowly realizing he can't leave (sounds familiar!), is just as powerful today as it was 70 years ago.
Something to Stream
Tootsie (Amazon Prime): I stumbled upon this 10-time Oscar nominee while scrolling through Amazon this week, and realized I'd never seen it. I absolutely loved it. Dustin Hoffman plays a pretentious actor who's such a diva he drives directors crazy (rumor has it, not too far from the truth). Then he dresses up like a woman and lands a role on a soap opera that becomes a sensation. As you'd expect, he falls in love with his female co-star. The movie is really funny, especially Bill Murray as Hoffman's roommate, and it's earnest and sweet, qualities that still worked in movies in the 1980s. Highly recommend.
Trailer Watch: The King of Staten Island
Prepare for Judd Apatow's comedy to be at the center of the culture in a few weeks. If you've seen his other movies, you know what that means. Great cast, light comedy, light drama, ugly guy gets the hot girl, happy ending. I, for one, am not ready to talk about Pete Davidson the movie star.