LEGEND
The movie’s main
advantage and/or talking point is Tom Hardy, who plays both twins. Reggie is
slick and confident, while Ronnie, a paranoid schizophrenic with strong
sadistic tendencies, is like Lenny in “Of Mice And Men” if Lenny had been an
East London mook, and evil to boot. Both performances are commanding, but not
as commanding as they might have been. The weaknesses of Helgeland’s writing
and directing are also to blame here. Particularly the latter: the unimaginative
(and, I imagine, practically expedient) framing of the two Hardys during scenes
in which they’re together makes the dual performance play like a tricksy stunt
at times. Helgeland could have learned a great deal from the blocking of dual
Jeremy Irons accomplished by David Cronenberg in “Dead Ringers,” which made the
viewer feel as if there were really two different people in the frame. Too many
times here there’s the feel of two different performances. Sometimes Hardy
manages to ignite a spark. There’s a scene in which Chazz Palmentieri, playing
a bluff emissary from the American Mafia, makes the twins an offer they’re
better off not refusing, Ronnie’s belligerence notwithstanding. When Ronnie
makes an unabashed announcement concerning his sexual preferences to this wise
guy, it’s a real moment. As is one with Hardy’s Reggie, finally confessing at
the end to his brother why he’s directing his own violent impulses so
destructively into one target.
The Kray
Brothers, Reggie and Ronnie, were such ostentatiously violent and vulgar
gangsters that they practically constituted a self-parody. They were both newly
in jail when the then-also-new comedy troupe Monty Python’s Flying Circus
deemed to lampoon them with a sketch about “The Piranha Brothers,” Doug and Dinsdale,
but the thing about that sketch, as it happened, was just how little it needed
to stray from reality in order to hit the comic mark. Nevertheless, the Krays,
who ruled criminal London from the late 1950s until their imprisonment in 1968,
did real and wide-ranging human harm in their careers; this is a fact that
Brian Helgeland, writer and director of a new crime movie about the twins,
doesn’t seem to have any good ideas about what to do with. But that isn’t why
“Legend” is such a muddle right off the bat.
Moments such as
these are too few and far between, while moments such as a wedding scene
prefaced by the song “Chapel of Love” are far too many. The lucky bride is
Reggie’s, and her name is Frances, and it’s with Frances’ story that the movie,
for me, broke away from irritating mediocrity and into genuine badness.
Helgeland’s
conception of Frances is doubly banal. First, he saddles her with the burden of
semi-omniscient narration that’s rife with platitudinous nonsense (“It was time
for the Krays to enter the secret history of the 1960s” and “Not even Scotland
Yard could ignore murder on the street,” the latter of which has the
uncomfortable echo of the bit in the Piranha Brothers sketch wherein the
gangsters detonate a nuclear device over London). Second, he gives her onscreen
character hardly any more depth than any of the complaining gangster and/or
undercover cop wives you’ve seen in dozens of crime pictures over the years,
Emily Browning’s committed performance notwithstanding. Which makes Helgeland’s
final trick with this character all the more objectionable when he finally
pulls it. I knew a bit about the case of the Krays before coming in to the
screening of the picture, but that knowledge wasn’t at the forefront of my
consciousness as I watched the movie. And then I thought … wait a minute. And
sure enough …
Spoiler alert:
Reginald Kray’s real-life first wife, Frances Shea, committed suicide in 1967,
two years after marrying Kray. And this is indeed depicted in the last fifth of
the film, complete with Frances-as-narrator playing a little bit of “gotcha”
with the audience. It strikes me as both aesthetically cheap and morally
dubious to make an actual suicide into your own Joe Gillis for the sake of …
well, that’s the other thing, which is I don’t know what “Legend” was made in
the sake of. It’s a squalid story told with very little in the way of a dynamic
personal perspective, and hence a waste of its very talented cast.
Right off the
bat it’s a muddle because of Helgeland’s slavish devotion to Martin Scorsese, a
bad thing to display when you don’t have Scorsese’s chops. Early on in the
picture, as Reggie Kray, the relatively charming, less psychotically violent of
the fellows, is courting his future wife Frances, Helgeland opts to do a little
“GoodFellas.” As Reggie escorts Frances into a pub where he’s the kingpin, the
moving camera follows from behind and glides alongside the couple as various
friends of Reggie pay their respects. On a stage at the back, a singer is
crooning “The Look of Love,” a song that had not actually been written when the
scene takes place, but never mind that. You know where this is going. Helgeland
wants to create his own version of the famed Copacabana tracking shot in
Scorsese’s legendary 1990 gangster film, but he hasn’t quite worked out all the
choreography—hence, the aforementioned singer ends up performing the world’s
longest version of “The Look of Love,” at least until the point at which the
sound editor or someone decided to have mercy and faded the guy out and
substituted some generic-sounding movie music. This is merely one example, and
a pretty outstanding one. There are plenty more throughout the film. (All of
this is doubly stupefying when one recalls what a solid job Helgeland did in
both writing and directing departments in his last picture, the 2013 Jackie
Robinson story “42.”)
