The James Clayton Column: are biopics bad for us?

By the silky lingerie of J Edgar Hoover! Is this the multiplex or Madame Tussaud’s? Are we at the movies here or experiencing some kind of projected animatronic waxwork museum project? I feel like I’m in Westworld, except instead of an android version of Yul Brynner’s gunslinger from The Magnificent Seven I’m being attacked by Margaret Thatcher’s fleshy doppelgänger.

I really do wonder sometimes when I gaze over the releases list. In today’s movie marketplace, big-screen biopics are standing out, claiming attention and casting shadows over festival circuits and awards ceremonies.

There have, of course, always been fact-based flicks that focus on real people from history. Charlton Heston, for example, managed to be Moses, Cardinal Richelieu, Mark Anthony, President Andrew Jackson, Michelangelo and El Cid at various points in his career.

I think it’s fair to say, though, that they are more prevalent than they used to be and, what’s more, these movies are less timid about touching on contemporary material and personalities. What we’re getting now is an onslaught of biographies and ‘based on true events’ tales before the pulses have ceased beating and the bodies have had chance to get cold.

Over the space of a month cinemas are screening The Lady (about Aung San Suu Kyi, Burmese political prisoner and human rights icon), The Iron Lady (about Margaret Thatcher, 80s British Prime Minister and milk-snatching botherer of miners), and J Edgar (about J Edgar Hoover, gangster-catching FBI director). Michelle Yeoh, Meryl Streep and Leonardo Di Caprio, respectively, all get to flex their acting muscles in cinematic accounts of history.

That’s just a sample of some political biopics on January’s screens. You may also wish to look ahead to upcoming releases like Madonna’s Wallis Simpson flick W.E. and David Cronenberg’s psychoanalysis study A Dangerous Method which features Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud and Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung.

Casting my memory back to this time last year, I recall how The King’s Speech (Colin Firth as stuttering George VI), The Social Network (Jesse Eisenberg as Facebook-founder Mark Zuckerberg) and The Fighter (Mark Walhlberg and Christian Bale as Boston boxers Micky Ward and Dicky Eklund) were big contenders around award season, battling for gongs and drawing praise from both critics and audiences.

The ‘award worthiness’ aspect in this biopic frenzy is particularly interesting. Taking Viggo Mortensen as a case study, I’d say he’s got way more chance of getting a BAFTA or an Oscar for playing Sigmund Feud than he ever had for superb performances in A History Of Violence, Eastern Promises and or even The Lord Of The Rings trilogy.

As a matter of fact, A Dangerous Method - a chronicle of actual history - most likely represents David Cronenberg’s only chance of ever getting anywhere near an Academy Awards nomination. There’s an implicit undermining of fictional material here, and it doesn’t seem just at all.

I’m not optimistic, as I consider Rooney Mara’s mercurial, mesmeric performance in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and place it alongside Meryl Streep’s in The Iron Lady - excellent acting and astounding mimicry, but ultimately a role that amounts to inhabiting a pre-existent shell.

I predict that Streep’s impersonation of Margaret Thatcher will get the awards and that all the chameleon-like energy, emotion and punishing commitment Mara poured into Lisbeth Salander will be overlooked and effectively snubbed, all because people are more beholden to familiar figurines and false notions of ‘worthiness’.

I don’t buy into the idea that a film has more value, more meaning and more relevance if it’s based on a true story and would argue, conversely, that fiction is in fact more likely to speak human truths.
For a start, the work of acting in a biopic is very limiting, as you have to conform to an existing model, and if we’re dealing with very recent history, the individual actor has even less room to breathe. There’s no creative liberty possible - just a fancy dress, professional impersonator challenge.

There’s also the fact that reality is distorted, as people dwell on the mirror and not what it’s meant to be reflecting. So many things get missed from the picture - Hollywood history is often reductive and radically condensed to make it more ‘audience friendly’ and meaning is lost.

Indeed, I’m not actually sure The Iron Lady does have any meaning, and would rate it primarily as a simply a striking replication, hamstrung in its ability to be much else. It skips across themes of power, struggle, loss, aging and personal conviction but audiences aren’t going to get any depth, because they’re too distracted by the novelty of Meryl Streep’s uncanny makeup.

If you want movies with genuine character that offer affecting tales of strong female outsiders overcoming great difficulties you can watch, say, An Education, Whip It, Hanna or The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, to name a few diverse flicks of recent vintage. All of them are built around fictional lead protagonists but have way more soul, substance, human heart and authenticity than The Iron Lady.

A screenwork that’s supposed to be emphatically real lacks ‘realness’ and essential humanity, and I’m more inclined to believe that fictional characters have more relevance than celebrities and famous folk - icons made of hype, public image artifice and deceptive pretence.

The implications of the celebrity fixation and the vogue for biopics built on contemporary personalities is troubling if fiction is undermined and “Madame Tussaud’s moviemaking” (to quote Ken Loach) is exulted and held in higher esteem to the detriment of cinema as a whole.

I fear that we lose the theatrical magic of moviemaking if impersonations and cold replication are deemed to be more important than telling stories, exploring the human condition and relaying emotion and ideas to audiences. Filmmaking shouldn’t be a karaoke contest where creativity is stifled and human spirit and depth are secondary. If this trend carries on so fervently, the film industry will be damaged as it becomes a stagnant scene crowded with statues, urging personality cults over imagination and the infinite richness of fictive worlds.

Ultimately, inhabiting those fictive realms is preferable to pondering waxworks, no matter how outstanding the figure or how remarkable the likeness. No one remembers karaoke performances, and a world where we think of Muhammad Ali as Will Smith, Helen Mirren as the Queen and Maggie Thatcher as a Meryl Streep role is just too warped and meta for my liking.

Beware false idols, for these empty shells will make you forget the greater truth.

James' previous column can be found here.

You can reach James on his Twitter feed here, see his film cartoons here and more sketches here.

Follow Den Of Geek on Twitter right here. And be our Facebook chum here.