Brian Helgeland (2015)
In bringing to the screen his account of the Kray twins at their vicious zenith, the writer-director Brian Helgeland is advantaged in two main ways. First, he has Tom Hardy playing both brothers – an intriguing gimmick that turns into a remarkable pair of performances. Second, the earlier biopic of Reggie and Ronnie, Peter Medak’s The Krays (1990), is hardly a tough act to follow. (Billie Whitelaw’s performance as the twins’ mother, Violet, was widely regarded as all that made The Krays worth seeing. It may be no coincidence that Helgeland reduces Violet, in terms of screen time, to a very small role in Legend – although Jane Wood plays her well.) Neither of these factors explains, of course, why anyone would want to make another film about the Krays but Helgeland’s title is an obvious clue. He said in a recent Guardian interview that he thinks the Krays (of whom he first heard in 1998) ‘were glamorous guys’ and this is evidently not just a distance-lending-enchantment American perspective on the grim brothers. Here is Nick James in the October 2015 Sight & Sound:
‘Legend … homes in on the twins’ heyday, which begins with their assault on rival gangs, continues with their acquisition of Soho nightclubs and builds towards the climax of the murders of [George] Cornell and [Jack] McVitie. That’s the Kray story that every Englishman expects and will come out for …’
In his adulatory piece about Tom Hardy in the same issue of S&S, David Thomson describes the Krays as ‘that undying Laurel and Hardy of London in the 60s …, our adorable untouchables’. Thomson’s words here are as tongue-in-cheek as James’s ‘every Englishman expects’ but both mean what they say at some level, and I can’t help being enraged by their treating the Krays as a laughing – worse, a chuckling – matter. Thomson is rather more serious when he writes, later in his piece, that:
‘There is a fantasy in getting off on the Krays (just as there was with the Corleones), yet if you look at photos of the real twins there is a blankness in their faces, a nullity, that can’t work on the screen, and which we don’t much want to see. Evil in life is not always glamorous, not even with the best swaggering actor around. Actors don’t do dull, or emptiness.’
Thomson’s mention of the Corleones is a reminder of his much less humorous judgment of The Godfather films. In his entry on Francis Ford Coppola in The New Biographical Dictionary of Cinema (Fifth Edition), Thomson is troubled that:
‘The Godfather is deeply reassuring in its rejection of chaos and disorder, and its paranoid insistence on the family as that dark, mysterious home where all strangers are enemies. When family is so strong, so loving, then the Corleones seem to be standing up for an old fine order, no matter that slaughter and graft are their trades.’
The Michael Corleone of The Godfather Part II, Thomson says:
‘… is unequivocally wicked: he turns on his own family. But still Coppola cannot disown the adolescent authority, the acting tough, of the gangsters … There is no horror in Part II, no moral outrage.’
The first two Godfather films are certainly disturbing – less for the reasons Thomson suggests than because the confusion of appalling and appealing qualities in the Corleones pushes the viewer into uncomfortable ambivalence. But even if he were right about what’s wrong with Coppola’s approach, the contrast between the stern moral strictures of the biographical dictionary and Thomson’s levity about the Krays would be startling. He deplores in the Godfather films the glamorisation of fictional gangsters; in the Sight & Sound piece, he wants screen recreations of actual gangsters to be more glamorous than the real thing. It’s as if Thomson now sees the homicidal gangster as primarily a creature of the cinema screen – a creature capable, moreover, of de-realising the true-crime gangster and eclipsing his inconvenient, malicious ‘nullity’. Here’s another example of a self-confident cinéaste subordinating life to the movies – and something of the same malaise informs Nick James’s indulgent reaction to Legend. Another depressing (and related) subtext to the James and Thomson pieces is that Britain doesn’t have as rich a mobster history as America, either in real life or in the cinema: we should therefore be grateful to the Krays for keeping our end up in gangster screen mythology.
Thomson is right about the faces of the actual Krays: you need only look again at David Bailey’s famous images of them to be reminded of that. I remember first seeing the best-known Bailey photograph as the cover of The Profession of Violence: The Rise and Fall of the Kray Twins, John Pearson’s 1972 book, on which Brian Helgeland purports to have based his screenplay for Legend. Tom Hardy is better-looking than the men he’s playing; and this, combined with the natural animation in his face, has the effect that David Thomson seems to be after. Hardy is also younger-looking – in spite of the fact that he’s already a few years older than the Krays were in 1969, when they were sentenced to life imprisonment: the actor’s youthfulness is thus a continuing reminder that the Krays, in their gangland prime, were in only their early thirties. Helgeland puts a strong emphasis on Reggie Kray’s attempts to manage the psychotic behaviour of his twin and Hardy is very good at expressing Reggie’s toxic combination of fraternal allegiance and criminal professionalism. Hardy’s Ronnie is grotesque in a rather more stylised way – but this fits with the slipperiness of the film as a whole, as Helgeland veers between the grim reality and the beyond-belief aspects of the Krays’ lives and operations. Although I didn’t spend time trying to work out the technical process whereby we see two Tom Hardys on screen at once, I did wonder – in both senses of the word – how Hardy was able, when playing a scene between Reggie and Ronnie, to spark with himself as he might with any other actor.
At 131 minutes, Legend is much too long; although Dick Pope lights the streets and club interiors interestingly, the film is sluggish until the mayhem gets underway. The staging of this is so emphatic and bludgeoning that I suppose it’s meant to go beyond reality, into black-comedy-strip-cartoon territory, but the grievous bodily harm and worse were still too real for me. The exaggerated violence isn’t that surprising in a Brian Helgeland film. Articles about Legend have tended to describe Helgeland simply as the Oscar-winning screenwriter of LA Confidential but it’s worth remembering that the first feature he directed (and co-wrote) was violently sadomasochistic swill – the Mel Gibson vehicle Payback (1999). Helgeland has, though, come up with a mostly effective narrative strategy for Legend. The voiceover is provided by Frances Shea, Reg Kray’s girlfriend for several years, and his wife for a much shorter time: they married and separated in 1965, and Frances committed suicide in 1967. The narration is well written to suggest an in-her-own-words tabloid account. Frances is (I think) meant to be affecting and Emily Browning, in her scenes with Tom Hardy, is certainly that. Her insubstantial prettiness makes her seem very right as a sixties sylph; and Browning gets across well Frances’s sad development from smitten simple-mindedness to pill-popping depression. But the language of the voiceover, at once lame and hyperbolic, gives Frances’s narration (even posthumously) a sustained satirical streak.
Paul Bettany finds Charlie Richardson, leader of the gang who were the Krays’ main East End rivals, very hard work but there’s some good acting elsewhere in Legend. David Thewlis is excellent, in a thoroughly naturalistic style, as the twins’ business manager, Leslie Payne. Casting Christopher Eccleston as Detective Superintendent ‘Nipper’ Reed, the Krays’ nemesis in the Met’s Murder Squad, also works well – at least if, as seems likely, Helgeland wanted to present Reed, repeatedly thwarted but eventually successful in sending the Krays down, as a somewhat ridiculous figure. (I wasn’t sure how much Eccleston’s characterisation owed to imaginative skill and how much to this actor’s trademark humourlessness.) Among the establishment figures, John Sessions is pretty good as Lord Boothby and Kevin McNally does a creditable job as Harold Wilson. The all-as-bad-as-each-other implication of Boothby’s role in the story is hardly valid, however, since he’s being compared with the Kray brothers. As for Wilson, a script editor should have pointed out to Brian Helgeland that no British politician (as distinct from an American one) would refer to a forthcoming General Election as ‘the elections’ (plural).
21 September 2015
