IMPERFECT PICTURES
Jamie Portman wonders why so many filmmakers feel they must lie while making biographies.
There's a riveting moment at the start of Oppenheimer that has nothing to do with nuclear physics. Instead it deals with attempted murder. That's when its driven young hero, J. Robert Oppenheimer, tries to dispose of an annoying university tutor with a cyanide-laced apple.
It's a great scene that writer-director Christopher Nolan has concocted, but there's one difficulty here. It never happened.
Given the overall power and integrity of this movie about the father of the atomic bomb, such a fabrication seems a singularly unfortunate lapse. Yet, it also highlights a persistent problem when it comes to film biographies. Why are so many moviemakers willing to play fast and loose with the truth?
That's a question being asked by the physicist's grandson, Charles. To be sure, he's happy with much of the movie, telling the Guardian newspaper that it's “a great work of art” — but the bit with the poisoned apple still dismays him. “There's not a single enemy or friend of Robert Oppenheimer who heard of that during his lifetime and considered it to be true.”
Oppenheimer, a deservedly honoured movie, nevertheless represents a genre that's repeatedly cavalier in its readiness to whitewash, distort and lie outright. Furthermore, it's not just a product of contemporary culture. Shakespeare did it too, glorifying Henry V to questionable proportions and turning Richard III into a villain.
In our present day, filming is soon to start on the life of Michael Jackson, with the full support of the singer's family, and the cynical consensus is that it will be a sanitized treatment that will carefully erase the tortured creep of the later years.
Meanwhile, Sony Pictures has decided to back director Sam Mendes's lofty plan to film four separate Beatles biographies — dealing individually with John, Paul, George and Ringo — and speculation is already mounting over how truthful they will be. The Hollywood Reporter calls the project “a massive roll of the dice” — given that Mendes intends to release all four movies in a single year. Meanwhile, in the rival Variety, veteran critic Owen Gleiberman is skeptical. “I don't think I'm being reckless or unfair when I say that right now, I don't trust Sam Mendes to have a vision of The Beatles profound enough to be worthy of The Beatles,” he writes.
Gleiberman has also joined the chorus of dissent against the recent Bob Marley movie, echoing complaints that it was far too reverential toward its subject. Gleiberman said it “slides into the banality of hero worship while The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw accused it of nepotism, describing it as a “Hallmark Channel-type” film.
Yet, despite the critical mauling, Marley has performed well at the box office.
Then there's the example of Bohemian Rhapsody playing fast and loose with Freddie Mercury's life but still a huge hit that won four Oscars. And more than half a century ago, audiences flocked to The Jolson Story, a film biography of Broadway legend Al Jolson, an entertaining but shameless piece of hagiography that didn't cringe from showing him performing in blackface (accurate), but eliminated two of his four marriages and presented him as a lovable human being. He wasn't.
Then there are those movie bios that do profess to get their subject right but still fail miserably. Consider the recent Maestro. Despite fawning reviews from some quarters, it was a mess in its failure to communicate the nature of Leonard Bernstein's musical genius. If there was a saving grace, it was to be found in Carey Mulligan's sensitive performance as Bernstein's wife, Felicia, struggling with the homosexual side of a man she deeply loved.
In terms of honesty, Maestro was admittedly an advance over other deceitful musical biographies — most notoriously the 1946 film Night and Day, a blighted project which, given the temper of the times, was forbidden to give any indication that famed Broadway composer Cole Porter, the man who wrote Anything Goes and Begin the Beguine, was gay. But Maestro, which in many ways seemed like actor-director Bradley Cooper's personal vanity project, was so hung up on Bernstein's private life that it failed to communicate the reality of his subject's musical greatness. This was the sort of movie where, if you accidentally blinked, you'd miss the fact that Bernstein wrote the score for West Side Story. And Cooper's performance was more a bundle of mannerisms than a characterization — teetering on parody with the endless cigarette smoking, even in his doctor's office, and an over-the-top display of Bernstein on the conductors podium, drenching himself in Mahler's music like some sweaty, wild-eyed creature from another planet.
Maestro is a movie that, with the best of intentions, keeps going wrong.
Others unrepentantly distort the truth — a prime example being Mel Gibson's Oscar-winning Braveheart, a skilfully rendered travesty of Scottish history more indicative of Gibson's anglophobia than any concern for fact. Robin Williams was immensely proud of Patch Adams, his hit comedy about a pioneering doctor who favoured radical new forms of health care. He would fly into a rage when journalists dismissed it as sentimental comic slop. But the reallife Hunter Doherty Adams found the film an embarrassment in the way it turned him into nothing more than a “funny doctor.”
When it comes to film biography, the closer one gets the present day the greater the possibility of pitfalls. That can trigger a protective mechanism on the part of wary filmmakers. There is no denying the power of A Beautiful Mind, which saw Russell Crowe secure an Oscar nod for his portrayal of Nobel-winning mathematician John Nash, who also happened to be a schizophrenic. But although the main storyline was accurate in depicting one man's struggle against adversity, Ron Howard's film fudged in other ways — concealing some distinctly unpleasant aspects in Nash's personal behaviour and manufacturing some of its most memorable moments.
However, does any of this matter if the public buys into it? British dramatist Peter Shaffer knew he was tinkering shamelessly with the truth when he wrote a play alleging bitter rivalry between composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri. But the resulting play, Amadeus, was an international hit and led, complete with its many falsehoods, to a much-celebrated film that has lost none of its lustre over the years. Yet, it's a movie that has also left many admirers believing that, yes, Salieri may have murdered his rival.
Again, in the world of popular entertainment does anybody really care about accuracy? Director John Ford's last great film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, said it all. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”