FAST & LOOSE
Hollywood rarely lets historical facts get in the way of telling a good tale
In the Oscar-nominated
The Favourite, Queen Anne keeps 17 pet rabbits in her 18th-century bedroom. Not true. The filmmakers made it up.
One of the most dramatic moments in Mary Queen of Scots occurs when England’s Elizabeth l and her troublemaking Scottish cousin, Mary, confront each other in person. The meeting never happened. Or as British historian Simon Schama has furiously tweeted: “The whole drama of Elizabeth and Mary lay in the fact that they never did meet.”
Then there’s the case of Bohemian Rhapsody, an Oscar front-runner. Despite Rami Malek’s lauded performance as Freddie Mercury, its untruths have sparked anger. “I’ve never seen a film distort its facts in such a punitive way,” fumed critic Mike Ryan.
It’s easy to shrug off the growing debate over this year’s Academy Award nominations and say — hey, it’s only a movie. But is this good enough?
Britain’s Guardian newspaper checked out the best picture nominations and concluded that, among those claiming some basis in fact, only two — Roma and Cold War — have avoided charges of inaccuracy.
Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins was especially incensed over Mary Queen of Scots, The Favourite and Vice, a satire about former U.S. vice-president Dick Cheney. He wanted to know why at a time of growing concern about fake news, these films were rewarding “fake instant history.”
Jenkins wasn’t pacified by Favourite director Yorgos Lanthimos’ admission that “some of the things in the film are accurate and a lot aren’t.” To which an irate Jenkins replied: “What is a history student to make of that?”
Historian Alex von Tunzelmann believes the controversy raises valid questions. “Does historical fiction alter our sense of reality?” he asked Guardian readers. “Do filmmakers have a responsibility to history? How can we navigate through a world where real and fake information are often blended together?”
The late George MacDonald Fraser, the witty author of the Flashman adventures, raised similar issues 21 years ago with a non-fiction book mockingly titled The Hollywood History of the World.
When it came to cinematic distortions of history, Fraser tended to be tolerant of Tinseltown’s lesser offences: “Hollywood is not a school for teaching history: it’s business is making money out of entertainment.” For him, the red line was crossed when a filmmaker broke faith “with the spirit of history” through wilful misrepresentation.
On this basis, Fraser hammered both 1935’s Oscar-winning Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Clark Gable and Charles Laughton, and its disastrous 1960s remake starring a preening Marlon Brando. He considered both films “glaring cases of distortion.” And Fraser’s Scottish pride was severely wounded by a later Oscar winner, Mel Gibson’s over-the-top Braveheart “which purports to tell the story of the great Scottish patriot, William Wallace, and commits as many historical errors as can well be contained in 170 minutes.”
Perhaps, though, the distance of centuries allows us to be more forgiving of such transgressions. The Favourite, an irreverent look at the court of the last Stuart monarch, may be causing outrage in some quarters, but it has not sparked the kind of polarizing debate that is now eroding the Oscar fortunes of Green Book.
Green Book purports to tell the true story about the friendship that develops between black pianist Donald Shirley and his brash white chauffeur, Tony Vallelonga, during a 1962 concert tour of the Deep South. It’s a feel-good movie, popular with audiences, but Shirley’s family has labelled it “a symphony of lies” — claiming no close friendship existed between the two.
Will this matter to academy voters? Who knows? Back in 2001, it didn’t deter them from naming Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind best picture, ignoring the fact that this was a carefully sanitized version of the life of Nobel laureate John Nash, a film that prefers to dwell on his courageous battle against schizophrenia and to skip over less savoury aspects of his personal life — including a belief in a master-slave relationship between husband and wife.
Still, it’s the films closer to us in time that can be the most problematic. Thoughtful Canadians know this only too well. Ben Affleck’s Oscar-winning Argo was a travesty — glorifying the role played by the Central Intelligence Agency during the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis and ignoring the fact that it was essentially a Canadian initiative that made possible the rescue of several stranded U.S. diplomats and ensured their safe departure from Iran.
But Canadians can’t always blame Hollywood for distorting their history. Prairie Giant, a CBC miniseries about the life and times of Tommy Douglas, features outstanding production values and a stellar performance from Michael Therriault as the diminutive Saskatchewan politician who brought medicare to Canada.
Too bad that the script keeps veering into fiction.