01 September 2010

Bronson

bronson 

I knew pretty much nothing about this movie until today. I had seen the very odd-looking poster, and just recently learned that the Scott Walker song The Electrician was used in the film, and that got me interested enough to check it out. I had figured it was another boxing movie like Cinderella Man or something. The Netflix description got me a bit more interested, saying it was a non-fictional story of a notorious prisoner with a deranged persona. Crazy people always make for entertaining movies.

Charles Bronson, born Michael Peterson in 1952, was (is) a sane man. However, he was still nutty. He felt that he should be important, and his method of getting there was physicality. He didn’t feel that he needed to do this in the traditional means; he should rocket to the top. The quickest way to do this would be to bash in every skull in sight, seemingly. Obviously this got him locked up in short order, but he didn’t have much of a problem with that. Prison was his playground, his gymnasium. He’s so far ended up spending 34 years in the clink, 30 of them in solitary confinement.

Anyway, the movie paints him as a fascinatingly resilient character. He narrates the movie in a sort of comedy show dream-sequence interludes between major events in his imprisoned and briefly free-roaming life, putting on a riveting performance of sudden mood changes and sarcastic storytelling. In the reenactment bits he’s often stoic when not pummeling people, with occasional outbursts; at other times he’s a perfectly likable guy who just isn’t very good at carrying conversations. A number of probably gay dudes give him advice or try to help him along the way (it’s a bit odd how they’re all like that). Eventually he starts drawing pictures as an outlet of sorts, which leads to a very strange artsy hostage situation near the end of the film. Then it ends.

Of course the story goes on for Bronson the man, who is still serving a life sentence and keeps stirring up trouble from time to time, while managing to release several books, convert to Islam, renounce Islam, have his art shown in a gallery, and continue to be pretty happy about everything. It’s a weird story but the movie makes it a very entertaining one.

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