SHOULD CELEBRITY BIOPICS STICK TO THE FACTS?
Thanks to the runaway success of Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman, we can look forward to plenty more celebrity biopics at the cinema. Movies about Boy George and David Bowie are in the works, while there has been talk of films about Madonna, Prince and George Michael. Another film, Judy, about a period of time in the life of Judy Garland, is released this week. And while I am interested to see it due to the positive reviews Renée Zellweger has been receiving for her portrayal of The Wizard of Oz star decades after she walked the Yellow Brick Road, I also know that I’m bound to be frustrated if the movie diverges too much from the real story.
Biopic makers seem to take a cavalier approach to actual events. As the saying goes: why let the truth get in the way of a good story? And I understand the distinction between a biopic as a work of entertainment as opposed to a documentary that slavishly sticks to the facts, but to me it’s just lazy writing to not capture what happened in someone’s life the way it actually occurred. Because what ends up happening when biopics distort the truth is that the onscreen version ends up being considered as the real story – and sometimes that’s far from the case.
These days when I see a biopic, I jump online afterwards to read about all the things the film changed – or, as I like to consider it, got wrong. If, like Rocketman, the famous person is someone whose career I’m familiar with, I sit in the cinema going, “Well, that’s not the way that happened,” or “That song didn’t come out at that point in Elton John’s career.”
Yes, sometimes it’s nitpicking, but often I can’t see any reason why the small details have been changed when it would have been just as easy to have got them right. And when it’s a major change, it just ruins my enjoyment of the film to know what I’ve seen is more work of fiction than, you know, a biographical account of someone’s life. Why even bother to make a biopic and keep up the pretence of it being about a real person if you are just going to make up your own story as you go?
The trend to get creative with facts is usually more marked in life story-style biopics, where entire careers are crammed into a couple of hours. Events are rushed through, people are conflated into invented characters and major moments are skipped over. Again, I can understand that not every single moment can make the final cut, but surely there are enough exciting truths that would alleviate the need to create lies to keep people entertained.
Often, biopics work best when they focus on a shorter span of their subject’s life, like in Judy, which concentrates on the singer’s life in 1969 with a few flashbacks to her start in Hollywood as a teenager. By all accounts, Judy sticks pretty close to the truth, with a couple of non-consequential embellishments. These days, that’s about as good as I can hope for. •