Wham bam thank you ma'am.

The difficulty with the biopic, is that you're never sure who or what you're talking about. Readers and viewers want to know whether "that's the way it really was" as if that may be the film's highest achievement. This ridiculous expectation makes it almost impossible to talk about these films without some kind of weirdly mediated back and forth between judgments as to what "he did, or did not." I prefer to treat the film as art. Period. Although one's fascination in a "biopic" is heightened by the possibility that the sensational things we see portrayed have, in fact, occurred, we ought to set these leanings aside and judge the art of the film.

The movie Bronson portrays, in a fictional way, the life of the British man formerly known as Michael Peterson, and now living under the name Charlie Bronson. I enjoyed it. It wasn't moving. It wasn't even very visceral. It was fascinating. It was a study that included, for me, equal moments of humour and amazement.

Some of the reviews I've read talk of Bronson as this anarchic force of primal violence that must be penned up. There's no question that Bronson is a violent man, but in the movie he wears his violence with a difference. Violence is this man's performance. It's what he does. If life is art, Bronson's medium is hitting and destabilizing. And for his tenacity, and bravery, and constant willingness to stand in the gap to show the shortcomings of institutions and life in a society governed by them, I applaud his type.

Certainly there are many events and individuals that can jar us out of our routine acceptance of institutions and their marginal adequacy, but it is only when someone arrives on the scene and, either deliberately, or by function of their nature, completely confounds society, that we might find a way to see what we, the people, have made to keep one another in check. The Bronson's of this world offer us another look. They challenge us to critique what we have wrought: a prison, a sanitarium, a school, a nightclub, a frustrated male, a celebrity-mad culture.

We can't all be stars, but Bronson insists on forcibly wresting his opportunity from us, whether we want to give it up or not. He will take it. He will act it out. He will play our id. We should be grateful. We should observe. We should wonder. We should reconsider.

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