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There are two performances of note in Capone, director Josh Trank’s truly strange, mostly unsuccessful portrait of a syphilitic Al Capone as he suffers a physical and mental breakdown. 

The first is Tom Hardy’s turn as the title character, which sails far past parody and ends up in fascinatingly bizarre cartoon territory. With his facial appliance and bug-eyed looks, his ostentatious pinstripe suits and luxury pajama-sets, Hardy looks more like a Dick Tracy villain than a real historical person. By the end of the film, he’s chomping a carrot instead of a cigar, and blasting away with a solid gold Tommy gun. And he sounds even less human than he looks. 

Hardy has frequently given his characters unusual, difficult-to-understand voices—the raspy croak of Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, the lumbering roar of Max Rockatansky in Fury Road—but here he delivers an unsurpassed level of unintelligibility. He chokes and gurgles and hacks out his dialogue; it’s possible there’s more phlegm than clearly decipherable language. Even when you can understand the lines, the particular words become almost meaningless: They are barked and grunted as physical emanations of confusion and rage, not sentences meant to communicate particular information. Every line of dialogue is rendered into a spittle-tinged “Eeeeuuuurgghhuuughrrgh.” Imagine listening to Miss Piggy attempting to shout paranoid nonsense in Italian while being violently choked to death for 100 minutes, and you’ll have some idea what it’s like to listen to Hardy in Capone. 

I can’t entirely say I enjoyed it, but it’s clear Hardy put a lot of effort into the act. Which brings us to the other performance—director Josh Trank’s. 

The young director broke onto the scene with 2012’s Chronicle, a cleverly constructed, modestly budgeted riff on the superhero origin story. It was a hit. Trank was not yet 30 years old, but he was set to become a major force in Hollywood, signing a deal to make a Star Wars film and landing at the helm of a major superhero production. But his 2015 reboot of Fantastic Four was an unmitigated disaster, plagued by huge conflicts both on and off the set, where Trank reportedly isolated himself from the rest of the cast and crew. Those battles broke into public view when, just days before release, he tweeted, “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.”

It’s never a great sign when a director publicly condemns his own film. Somehow, Fantastic Four managed to be even worse than almost anyone expected, earning a well-deserved reputation as one of the worst studio blockbusters in recent history. Trank’s Star Wars deal fell apart, and he was branded as difficult to work with. Once a hot Hollywood property, Trank was on the outs.

Capone, then, represents a comeback of sort, or at least an attempt at one. As with Hardy’s bizarrely over-the-top portrayal, Trank, who wrote, directed, and edited the film, has clearly put in some effort. There’s a dour mood to the production, a looming sense of the ominous. At times it becomes almost dreamlike, especially when Twin Peaks‘ Kyle MacLachlan appears as Capone’s doctor. Trank’s camera seems to haunt Capone’s gaudy South Florida estate, and he occasionally cuts away from the action to languorous shots of the swamp and sky. He stages elaborate hallucinatory sequences, a mixture of grandiose memory and paranoid confusion, as if to take viewers inside Capone’s head.

Trank, who spent much of the last five years in director jail, clearly sees a bit of his own story in the aging, post-prison gangster. Capone, whose rise to power peaked in his late twenties and early thirties, may have been a bad man, but he was a somebody, a boss who ran things and made an impact—all while he was very young. And at what should have been the peak of his life, he was put in jail. He came out the other side distraught, confused, paranoid and bitter, sometimes hurting the people he loved the most. Who couldn’t relate to that?

Trank seems to sees this as a story that people will connect with, but despite his technical flourishes, it’s told in such a halting, discursive manner, with so little driving conflict that it’s likely to leave most viewers cold. The movie reveals almost nothing about Capone or his motivations, nothing about the particulars of his criminal enterprises or the Prohibition era that enabled his brand of violent terror. It probably tells us more about Trank himself, and the perils of rapid Hollywood success, than it does about the storied gangster it’s putatively about. It’s a portrait of a director in meltdown. 

That Capone is garnering much attention at all is probably due, at least in part, to the fact that coronavirus lockdowns have wiped Hollywood’s release schedule clean. Normally this would be the start of the summer movie season, but the lack of major releases means that more attention is paid to oddities like this or last week’s Arkansas, another interesting, modestly budgeted failure. I didn’t care for either, yet I’m glad to have both available to watch at home: Weird, unsuccessful, self-indulgent movies are far better than no movies at all.

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Remy discovers the dangers of exercising alone.

Written and performed by Remy. Music tracks, mastering, and background vocals by Ben Karlstrom. Video produced by Meredith and Austin Bragg.

LYRICS:
If you go out on the ocean
Across the USA
And you’re wearing a swim shirt
‘Cuz of your scrawny weight (it’s for the sun, I swear)

Well, uh, you just might notice
The police in your wake
Cuz it’s illegal to be surfing
In the USA

They’re catching them out paddle boarding
Letting their children play
While they’re releasing this guy
A logical checkmate

You’re out in nature alone now
No one in six-foot range?
Well it’s illegal to be surfing
In the USA

If only you had flashed some children
It’d be your release date!
But you’re going to jail for surfing
In the USA

You’ve been distancing for months now
To keep the spread rate down
The only places you’ve been going
Are where there are no crowds

You’re making sacrifices
For your community
Now put your hands on your head because you are surfing
In the USA

He’s helping the flattening the curve now
He’s exercising alone
Rocking a super baggy swim shirt
To hide his muscle tone (I said it’s for the sun)

If only you had flashed some children
It’d be your release date!
But you’re going to jail for surfing
In the USA

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The ACLU vs. due process. If you were looking for more evidence that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has been losing its principled approach to civil liberties, look no further: The group has filed suit to thwart Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s recently proposed reforms to bolster due process protections for students accused of sexual misconduct.

“DeVos has discarded decades of [the Department of Education’s] experience addressing sexual harassment and assault by promulgating regulatory provisions that sharply limit educational institutions’ obligations to respond to reports of sexual harassment and assault,” wrote the ACLU in its lawsuit. “If allowed to be implemented at educational institutions nationwide, these provisions will make the promise of equal educational opportunities irrespective of sex even more elusive. This is true for all students, including students of color, LGBTQ students, and students with and without disabilities, in grade school, high school, and higher education.”

The lawsuit frequently asserts that marginalized students will suffer under the new rules, but it never acknowledges that students of color were disproportionately harmed by the old rules. White woman accuses black man of rape; black man is expelled was a distressingly common series of events under the old regime—one that might have invited sympathy from an older model of the ACLU, given the organization’s historic concern that racism in the criminal justice system has led to disparately harsh outcomes for black people.

Not this time. To the extent the lawsuit addresses racism, it uses it as a cudgel to break apart DeVos’s carefully considered revisions to some Obama-era rule changes. The lawsuit frequently notes—as if this is some trump card that should override the new protections—that there is now a different standard for allegations of sex-based discrimination than there is for race-based discrimination on campuses:

The newly issued Rule, however, includes several provisions that are contrary to both the language and spirit of Title IX [the federal statute that governs sexual misconduct in schools], and depart significantly not only from consistent past practice, but create a double standard, in which educational institutions have dramatically different obligations to respond to harassment based on sex, on the one hand, and race, national origin, and disability on the other. Despite issuing a 2,000 page “preamble,” [the Department of Education] never adequately explains why it is treating sexual and racial/national origin/disability harassment differently, despite similar statutory prohibitions. This double standard will have a devastating effect on survivors of sexual harassment and assault and their educations.

It would be one thing if the ACLU’s complaint was that due process protections for students accused of racial harassment are insufficient, given the stronger protections for those accused of gender-based harassment. But no: The organization wants the protections to be equally thin.

Indeed, the lawsuit takes aim at one of the most important aspects of the reforms: mandatory reporting. Under the new rules, universities do not have to initiate a formal Title IX investigation unless the alleged victim requests one. (In K–12, investigations are still mandatory.) A student who finds herself the victim of misconduct can now confide in a university employee—a supportive teacher or a coach—without worrying the matter will immediately escalate into formal and adversarial adjudication. Many victims do not want their assailants investigated, or to go through the steps that it would take have them sanctioned. They want to be heard, supported, and counseled. Several Title IX lawsuits have involved scenarios where the university conducted an investigation that was contrary to the victim’s wishes.

“Sexual harassment and assault have no place in our schools,” declared the ACLU in its press release. “Federal law imposes obligations on schools to make sure that’s the case. Students shouldn’t have to jump through hoops just to report abuse.”

Under the new rules, the “hoop” is a Title IX official. Report misconduct to the official, and an investigation begins. For victims who wish to begin formal adjudication, this hardly seems like an unreasonable requirement.

This is damning with the faintest of praise, but it’s a relief the ACLU is refrains from taking aim at DeVos’s requirement that Title IX investigations involve hearings where attorneys or representatives for both parties can question each other. Still, the fact that the lawsuit exists at all is deeply troubling. This is an organization once known for refusing to betray its principles, no matter how unsympathetic the person whose rights are being violated. (One wonders what the new ACLU would do if a member of the Westboro Baptist Church enrolled at a university and began shouting one of the church’s crude “God hates X” slogans at a person belonging to a group protected under Title IX.)

Compare the actions taken by the ACLU on this front with the stance it took on victims’ rights vis a vis Marsy’s Law:

Marsy’s Law is premised on the notion that victims should have “equal rights” to defendants. This opening salvo is a seductive appeal to one’s sense of fairness. However, the notion that victims’ rights can be equated to the rights of the accused is a fallacy. It ignores the very different purposes these two sets of rights serve.

Victims’ rights are not rights against the state. Instead, they are rights against another individual. The Marsy’s Law formula includes the rights to restitution, to reasonable protection, and to refuse depositions and discovery requests, all of which are enforced against the defendant. Such rights do nothing to check the power of the government. In fact, many of the provisions in Marsy’s Law could actually strengthen the state’s hand against a defendant, undermining a bedrock principle of our legal system—the presumption of innocence.

This risk further underscores one of the overarching concerns about Marsy’s Law: It pits victims’ rights against defendants’ rights. Creating such a conflict means that defendants’ rights may lose in certain circumstances. This result accepts that defendants’ rights against the state will be weakened or unenforced in some cases, potentially at a significant cost to constitutional due process. In other words, the chances that an innocent person could be convicted of a crime they did not commit could potentially increase. The proponents of Marsy’s Law may not intend for this outcome, but nothing in their formula prevents it.

So much for that.

CORONAVIRUS QUICK HITS

• Poll: Compliance with social distancing is dropping—both in states that don’t have stay-at-home orders and states that do.
• “Florida man beats Covid, for now.”
• The House of Representatives will allow members to vote on bills remotely.
• Retail sales fell 16.4 percent in April.
• Maryland and Virginia (but not D.C.) are relaxing their lockdowns.
• “The ‘just stay home’ message will backfire.”

The journey from Tokyo to Hong Kong normally takes me about five hours. It’s now been 19 hours since I left Narita airport and I’m still not home, as I await my COVID-19 test result. This is what international travel is like during the coronavirus pandemic. (Thread) pic.twitter.com/mjO0N3PUil

— Will Ripley (@willripleyCNN) May 15, 2020

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