For instance, it’s no surprise that the history-obsessed John Ford made a bunch of excellent ones and that the extravagantly inventive Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock did hardly any. It’s fascinating to see which great directors have chosen to make bio-pics (whether one as an exception or many as a habit) and what that choice reveals of their art. The list that follows is thus also a parade of great directors. Unlike with melodramas or comedies, it takes greatness to advance the art of bio-pics. The genre poses challenges of scope and psychology akin to the stringent visual challenges posed by musicals. But bio-pics are different, because they are about extraordinary people, and fewer directors, writers, and actors are able to successfully imagine their way into this level of extraordinariness. Part of the long-standing collective lament for the demise of the mid-budget dramatic movie-essentially, realistic movies featuring movie stars-is that it’s a form that even middling directors, writers, and actors have always done well. Most directors, like most people, have interesting observations about their daily lives, their communities, their fields of endeavor-and plenty of directors have, as artists, the practical skill to convey such observations. I suspect that this inability, for novelists (and for filmmakers), goes beyond the limits of the artistic sphere to extend, over all, to exemplary achievers in any field. I’m reminded of an aphorism that I have long recalled as being written or said by Norman Mailer-please crowdsource me-to the effect that the one kind of character that no novelist can successfully imagine is a better novelist. Perhaps the hardest thing about making bio-pics, at least ones regarding figures of actual greatness, is the inability of most directors to consider such heroes face to face, to share in the grandeur or the enormity of these protagonists’ inner lives. With all the overt and tacit calculation that goes into the production of bio-pics, it’s something of a miracle that any of them are any good at all, yet indeed some of them are even great. If the makers of bio-pics freely elaborate (i.e., distort, bowdlerize, even falsify) the facts of their heroes’ lives, they don’t do so any more than the average Hollywood movie falsifies human experience at large, but they do so with an imprimatur of authenticity. Nonetheless, the connection of bio-pics to ostensible reality is the hidden power of their success. (Fear not: by the time Hollywood gets done with these lives, they’re rarely any stranger than the usual fictions, and may not even be that true.) Presenting real-life stories as extraordinary adventures, bio-pics embody the axiom that truth is stranger than fiction. Bio-pics bathe the producers, the studios, and the filmmakers in the reflected renown of their protagonists’ achievements, and, because the enterprise inherently involves a good deal of research, it also conveys an air of studious seriousness. That attracts stars, which in turn attracts audiences. Robert Oppenheimer may be the exception that proves the rule he’s less famous than Freddie Mercury, but the atomic bomb is more so.) And the illustrious people who inspire bio-pics offer great showcases for actors. The protagonists are people who audiences are already familiar with and interested in. For producers and studios considering which projects to green-light, bio-pics check a lot of boxes. The form’s peculiar place in the art of movies is inseparable from the reasons for its exceptional prominence in the business. The trouble isn’t only that of inflated prestige bio-pics are disproportionately prominent during awards season and therefore ballyhooed nearly to oblivion. The best ones share a uniquely powerful artistic authority, but merely ordinary ones are truly disheartening.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |