A Beautiful Mind got the best picture Oscar. But do biopics really work?
John Patterson
For a genre often considered the very essence of fermented box-office poison, the biopic seems to be doing all right at the moment. Usually we go years between big-screen biographies of public figures. A film like Malcolm X will flop and put the kibosh on similar projects for years to come, which is why we’ve never seen that long- gestating Martin Luther King project materialise. And Oliver Stone’s Nixon, despite being his most settled, least infantile movie, didn’t pull down the kind of money that might have guaranteed a follow-up say, Kissinger: The Life and Crimes of an Unrepentant War Criminal. But here we are with two major, big-budget biopics doing the rounds.
As usual, everything’s the wrong way round. Michael Mann’s Ali, which isn’t exactly burning up the cash registers, may be flawed, but it’s fascinating in ways that A Beautiful Mind, Ron Howard’s “uplifting”, “heart-warming” “triumph of the human spirit” (I cite the breathless blurbs) simply can’t manage, although it’s currently making a mint.
Ali is a montage-based portrait of almost a meditation on a figure so well-known to us as a media creation that he has become almost unknowable to us as a human being. Mann is to be commended for his ambitions in Ali, and for admitting that there’s a kernel of his subject’s being that will forever stay hidden. He goes for verisimilitude in his usual obsessive manner, in every area from performance, costume and period detail to film stocks, editing choices and sound design. But he seems more interested in bringing to the screen the richness and turbulence of the African-American experience between 1964 and 1974 than he is in pinning down the Champ, body and soul.
And there’s something brilliantly quixotic about spending millions to recreate some of the most famous and compelling news and sports footage of that period. Ali is thus almost as much about the media that Ali exploited as it is about Ali himself. The film may be problematic, but it fairly hums with ideas and invention.
That really can’t be said about A Beautiful Mind, which follows the formula for box-office glory and Oscar acclaim. The less well-known life of Nobel mathematics laureate John Henry Nash is simply raw material from which screenwriter Akiva Goldsman carves out the usual, grindingly familiar Hollywood story arc of suffering, transcendence and, for the audience, pure, mindless affirmation. Nash’s paranoid-schizophrenic breakdown is amped up in manipulative fashion, while his sexual experimentation is jettisoned. The result is a movie you’ve seen before. If you doubt me, go out and rent Shine, of which it’s almost a carbon copy.
Biography is big business in America at the moment. The Arts & Entertainment Channel’s series Biography, which showcases both important historical figures and mediocre showbiz burn-outs, was so successful that it spawned first its own spin-off magazine and then, last year, a separate cable enterprise, the Biography Channel. Its success is all of a piece with VH-1’s Behind the Music, which prefers its rock stars in the ground or on the Big Needle, and the women’s-issues channel Lifetime’s Intimate Portrait series, which profiles notable women in a wet-eyed, gooey, affirmative manner.
In their choice of subject, these shows barely venture outside the perimeter of values established by the studios for big-budget biopics. There are two or three basic templates. First is the Shine/Beautiful Mind model, with misery and madness giving way to personal triumph. Then there’s what I call the Drink, Death and Divorce approach, these being the cornerstones of both country music and the country/ rock’n’roll biopic, wherein a down-home gal or guy leaves the log cabin for a life of honky-tonkin’, white pills and a fifth of Jim Beam under every cushion on the couch. Finally, there’s the reliably depressing Way to Dusty Death trajectory inevitably a downward one all the way the purest example of which is probably Sid and Nancy or Love Is the Devil.
I say dump these old approaches and find a new way. You can’t encapsulate a human life in three hours of screentime. You can barely do it in three 800-page volumes of biography, particularly if, as in the case of Ali, Nixon, and Malcolm X, the subject is firmly embedded in our collective memory in the form of deteriorating news footage and grainy old TV shows.
Better to seek out subjects whose lives, though important and influential, were not heavily covered by the media in their own lifetimes. While watching Ali, I noticed one minor figure who truly deserves a biopic worthy of his complex life and soiled legacy: the soul singer Sam Cooke. Because he was the first black singer to cross over successfully from gospel to pop music, because he was an astute black businessman who deformed his own musical talent even as he refused to take any racist shit, and because he died a sleazy, sordid death in 1964, Cooke’s story is infinitely more complex than many others seen as more conventionally “uplifting”.
Still, try telling that to his relatives, who wouldn’t be too happy seeing his ignominious last night smeared across the screen. The authorised version would probably resemble the 1968 Hank Williams biopic Your Cheating Heart, a widow-approved travesty starring tan-man George Hamilton, in which the elusive and myth-encrusted Williams is sanitised to death onscreen.
I know that the director Paul Schrader has long been interested in the lives of both Williams and the tragic entertainer Bobby Darin, but Schrader’s decline in stature reduces our chances of seeing either of those potentially fascinating projects.
I hope someone with greater influence will pick them up or break out of the straitjacket and make a few anti-biopics. We need more Raging Bulls and fewer Beautiful Minds.