Biopics

...uses it to feed his obsessions...

...There are many reasons for Hollywood's enduring attraction to potted biographies...

...And every stage is punctuated by his inimitable music, lip-synched so well by Jamie Foxx that we never think to ask who is actually singing...

...Edelstein argues that biopics cannot be great because their structure is too linear and riddled with biographical cliches, but this is a self-fulfilling argument, because he narrows his definition strictly to cradle-to-grave stories: "A biopic is not just a movie about a real segment of a real person's life," he says...

...Compared to Ray Charles, who managed to reinvent himself in every decade, Darin is a dim, unappealing subject, and the movie's script is exceptionally clunky...

...for all his force of will, which occasionally enables him to pull himself together, Hughes is an emotional vacuum with such an incongruous set of passions and problems that neither actor nor director can quite make him a plausible character...

...WHAT PERHAPS drew Scorsese to Hughes was his erratic but pioneering role in the movie business, where he first displayed the overweening perfectionism that foreshadows his descent into psychosis...

...Other subjects of last year's most compelling biopics include the young asthmatic medical student Ernesto Guevara in Walter Salles's The Motorcycle Diaries, who develops a social conscience during a three-week stay at a leper colony in the Peruvian Andes...

...Costume dramas, especially those set in the ancient world, often resemble animated cartoons...

...Beyond the Sea begins on a soundstage with Darin making a movie of his own life?\this movie, really?\while De-Lovely is framed by an angel-impresario named Gabe, played by Jonathan Pryce, leading the aged (or deceased) Porter through the highs and lows of his career...

...The script would have us believe that despite Porter's flagrant affairs, this odd marriage was the anchor of his life...

...Perhaps it was, but De-Lovely?\though much more honest than Night and Day, the 1946 film biography?never enables us to understand it...

...and his occasional cruelty, especially toward his wife, Linda Lee...

...By the next decade, when politics of any kind became suspect, the tide shifted to show business, with biographies of popular composers such as George Gershwin and Cole Porter and vintage performers such as Al Jolson, movies that were really musical anthologies held together by largely fabricated biographical paste...

...Up until the last election, after the unprecedented success of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9 / 1 1 , it looked like the year of the political documentary...

...Unlike less persuasive biopics, Kinsey may be an authentic period piece, reminiscent of its times yet also a timely blast from the past...

...Ramon Sampedro, a longtime quadriplegic who campaigned in Spain for the right to die, played with luminous intelligence by the great Spanish actor Javier Bardem in Alejandro Amendbar's powerful The Sea Inside...

...With the help of a good location, a lavish set, intimate close-ups, and an expensive cast of stars and extras, even mediocre movies can achieve a verisimilitude beyond anything on the stage or page...

...Through script after script, Spacey, though too old for the part, moved heaven and earth to get this picture made...

...He tactlessly alienates the foundation that funds his research and the university president who supports him, sows conflict among his assistants by encouraging wife-swapping?\strictly for research purposes?\and wounds his loyal wife with his own experiments in bisexuality...

...Reproducing Charles's near-spastic bobbing movements at the piano, he seems to inhabit the man's body the way Charles himself was electrified by the music...

...What De-Lovely needed was the verve and exuberance of the great MGM musicals of the 1940s and 1950s...

...As one of the unlikely revolutionaries of the postwar years, Kinsey certainly engages me more than Howard Hughes, though not as much as the incandescent Ray Charles...

...Darin's career is cut short by heart disease, inferior material, changing musical tastes...

...Besides Foxx, the only other actor who carried off this kind of mimetic coup this year was Cate Blanchett in The Aviator, who not only captured Katherine Hepburn's swanky speech rhythms and lithe, athletic movements but gave the movie a human center that could not be supplied by her self-absorbed lover, Howard Hughes, as played by Leonardo DiCaprio...

...DISSENT / Spring 2005 107...

...Like all biopics, they answered to a fascination with the private lives of popular icons, which had alDISSENT / Spring 2005 103 NOTEBOOK ways been a staple of fan magazines, tabloids, and gossip columns, as well as fictional films about Hollywood, such as A Star Is Born (1937...

...As Lionel Trilling pointed out in reviewing the first Kinsey Report in 1948, he sunders sex from love, culture, morality, and feeling?\indeed, from everything but nature itself, as if the dictates of nature were always clear and unambiguous, and always beneficent...

...Probably the worst biographical film of the year was Kevin Spacey's Beyond the Sea, which exhumes the story of a half-forgotten pop singer, Bobby Darin, a Sinatra wannabe who died of rheumatic heart disease in 1973 at the age of thirty-seven...

...The strained abstinence of the pre-Kinsey era is back as a conservative rallying cry, if not as an actual practice...

...Nathanael West made a poker-faced mockery of this in The Day of the Locust as he described the disastrous filming of the Battle of Waterloo on a studio lot...

...and ends up as a recluse, loveless and alone...

...Hollywood has always had a ravenous appetite for material and an imperial confidence in its ability to reprocess the world into pictures that improved on the original...

...106 DISSENT / Spring 2005 NOTEBOOK Kinsey does not stint on its subject's awkwardness, innocence, and naivete, which the tall, gawky Liam Neeson is particularly good at projecting...

...The last of these especially reminds us that unlike the show-business biographies, some biopics are driven by a strong sense of social purpose...

...In his column in Slate last fall, film critic David Edelstein, swamped by a surfeit of new releases, challenged his readers to name a single great movie ever made in this genre...

...Nor do these stories need to be strictly believable...

...Though biopics sometimes celebrate a Man of the People (such as Woody Guthrie in Bound for Glory) and even radicals or revolutionaries (as in The Life of Emile Zola, Spartacus, or Viva Zapata), their politics are basically conservative, because they are thoroughly devoted to the Great Man theory of history, to an unquestioned individualism, and their safely canonized troublemakers usually belong to a distant era...

...To me it initially seemed like bringing coals to Newcastle in today's anything-goes climate, however urgent these issues may have been in the immediate postwar years...

...He himself sings Darin's songs, which include some 1950s rock 'n' roll, a few good ballads like "Mack the Knife" and "Beyond the Sea," followed by an unsuccessful drift into political folksinging...

...and his mother's fierce determination, in spite of their poverty, that he make his own way, whatever his handicap...

...Middlebrow to the core, they lend themselves to tintypes of period dress, vintage transportation, and exotic settings...

...It concludes, for example, with a soft-shoe routine by Spacey and the young actor who plays him as a boy...

...He strokes the metal skin of a new aircraft with sensuous satisfaction even as he is gradually withdrawing from all human touch...

...Such a domineering role, bordering on megalomania, demanded a more stylized performance by an actor of greater physical and emotional heft, an over-the-top performer like Orson Welles or George C. Scott...

...There could then be no equivalent of Citizen Kane, a made-up story that closely shadowed the life of a real person, or of film biographies, from Abel Gance's epic Napoleon of 1927 to Oliver Stone's equally grandiose Alexander, that laced history with the pulpy trappings of fiction...

...But while Porter's music and Kevin Kline's performance never fail to give the movie DISSENT / Spring 2005 105 NOTEBOOK a lift, especially in the few numbers (like "Be a Clown") where the production really lets go, the dramatic scenes have the moribund, decorative quality that haunts period movies...

...IS THERE any reason why biopics should be enjoying their current vogue, or are their subjects too dissimilar to permit any general explanation...

...His new book, A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World, is forthcoming from Princeton...

...But the media wars ultimately had less influence than old-fashioned, get-out-the-vote campaigns, and by the end of the year most of the major American movies turned out to be "biopics," biographies of real people from the recent or distant past, from Jesus of Nazereth and Alexander the Great to Alfred C. Kinsey, Howard Hughes, and Ray Charles...

...Whether exploring matters of fact or fiction, movies, like the novels that preceded them, have always been interested in the arc of individual lives, the intricate unfolding of relationships and careers, and the tensions between our inner feelings and the face we put on for the world at large...

...But even Scorsese, who also directed DiCaprio in Gangs of New York, could scarcely match the level of identification that some actors and directors feel for their biopic subjects...

...It is a movie that, like a written biography, attempts to take the measure of that life, from birth (or youth) until death (or old age...

...Imitating a much-loved performer, someone who is still such a vivid presence, is almost an impossible feat...

...Porter's friends Gerald and Sara Murphy might as well be mannequins: the clothes and the look are all that matters...

...The Aviator is Martin Scorsese's Citizen Kane, the story of a man mysteriously warped in childhood who inherits great wealth...

...Irwin Winkler's De-Lovely, a much-anticipated film biography of Cole Porter, resembles Beyond the Sea in using Citizen Kane-like flashbacks to escape the dull progression of linear storytelling...

...Movies recycle everything in their unflagging hunger for material...

...IT'S TRUE THAT those who write such films are saddled with many known facts, but unlike formal biographers (yet similar to novelists) they can be vigorously selective, shaping mere data into stories that work dramatically...

...production design overwhelms personality...

...Having spent much of his career as an entomologist doing taxonomies of gall wasps, Kinsey saw human beings as "just bigger and more complicated gall wasps...

...Many of those they came up with were examples of magnificent performances in near-great movies: George C. Scott in Patton, Robert De Niro in Raging Bull, Vanessa Redgrave in Isadora, Jessica Lange in Frances, Sissy Spacek in Coal Miner's Daughter, Ben Kingsley in Gandhi, Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind, Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia...

...Biopics first came into vogue in the early 1930s, when a tony British actor named George Arliss sat for waxworks effigies of Benjamin Disraeli, Voltaire, the Duke of Wellington, Cardinal Richelieu, and other notables whose names belonged as much to popular culture as to history...

...his personal problems include a deteriorating marriage to a Kewpie-doll actress, Sandra Dee, whose career thrives as his falls apart, and the belated discovery that the mother who raised him was in fact his grandmother, while his older "sister" was actually his mother...

...his growing desolation...

...It shows how such movies can provide audiences with a richly varied gallery of role models as well as cautionary examples?\outsized characters whose public achievements and private traumas may yet have something singular to tell us...

...Because biopics were inhibited by wellknown facts about the lives of their subjects, such movies tended to produce great performances rather than great pictures...

...But biopics also achieve power by dealing with the inner demons that dog their subjects' paths and the temptations that beset them in their glory years, always threatening to bring them down...

...As actorsinger-director, Spacey hogs every scene and makes Darin's short-lived celebrity the occasion for an ego-tripping star turn...

...This 1960s makeover was too derivative to appeal to the young and meant nothing to his Las Vegas-style audience...

...But the recent rise of the cultural and religious right and the resurgence of "moral values" as a code for restrictions on expression, sex education, and social services (including birth control) put a different spin on the movie's message...

...Because the subjects of biopics are by definition famous, set off from others by notoriety or achievement, these movies fall into the predictable patterns of success stories, showing the rise, against daunting obstacles, from humble beginnings, to some kind of renown...

...But from the beginnings of the sound era, American movies pillaged history and biography for colorful life histories that could never have worked as well on the stage...

...E MORRIS DICKSTEIN teaches English and film studies at the CUNY Graduate Center...

...on their own the characters make little sense...

...and Alfred Kinsey in Bill Condon's impressive Kinsey, another labor of love...

...Most biopics do no such thing...

...But at the center of The Aviator DiCaprio is something of a cipher...

...By reversing their age difference and making Linda seem much younger than Porter, the movie erases the maternal side of the relationship (which, along with the money from her first marriage, may have been the glue that kept it together...

...Warner Brothers, the studio most linked to the New Deal, responded by enlisting Paul Muni to play Louis Pasteur, Zola, and other figures of humanist uplift...

...Robert Downey, Jr., is a gifted actor, but Chaplin was a movie that never should 104 DISSENT / Spring 2005 NOTEBOOK have been made, because Chaplin's comic gifts allow for no impersonation...

...The scene in which she holds back when he falls and cries out for help resonates through the whole movie...

...the initial horror of his blindness, probably due to glaucoma...

...In this respect they resemble gangster movies and show-business fables about being catapulted into stardom...

...It remains to be seen whether this is the kind of Capra-esque hero we need today, or a pleasant anachronism, a piece of nostalgia for a simpler world...

...All biopics appeal to a blatant voyeurism, but here we peer unpleasantly into the ego of the actor rather than the inner life of the subject...

...They must somehow inject fresh life into the standard tropes of the genre...

...Works such as Ray and The Aviator, Martin Scorsese's charming but overlong film about Howard Hughes, deal mainly with turning points, not complete life histories...

...The nineteenth century was a great era for novels and biographies but an iron discretion kept them in separate spheres...

...her pitiless message of independence translates into his own steely self-sufficiency, his sometimes callous insistence on living a full life, whatever the cost to others...

...To this we may now add Jamie Foxx's brilliant impersonation of Ray Charles in Taylor Hackford's Ray, easily the best biopic of the year and an instructive lesson in why so many others fall short or fail miserably...

...But as the film portrays him, his real emotions are invested neither in movies nor in women but in aviation?\designing planes, building them, flying them...

...In the aviation business he still reminds us of a movie director, slight of build like Scorsese himself, a stickler for detail, constantly experimenting, yet mobilizing a huge workforce to new levels of technical achievement...

...By the next decade, this focus on the pain behind the fame, the price of success, led inexorably to tales of drug addiction and alcoholism in movies like I'll Cry Tomorrow (1955), adapted from a best-selling memoir by Lillian Roth...

...The 1950s created the therapeutic culture that still dominates daytime television...

...Kinsey is a brief for personal freedom, sexual enlightenment, and open discussion...

...But they work beautifully in Ray, where they convey Charles's sense of guilt at his brother's death (the boy drowns in a washtub, in front of Ray's eyes...

...DiCaprio was perfect in a recent chase movie by Steven Spielberg, Catch Me If You Can, in which he played a con man and counterfeiter who always stays one step ahead of his Javert-like pursuer, played with quiet tenacity by Tom Hanks...

...what it provides instead is a tasteful dip into 1920s and 1930s nostalgia and a halfhearted acknowledgment of Porter's homosexuality...

...In a shameless bid for a younger audience, the movie also showcases contemporary pop singers performing Porter's most famous numbers...

...After learning to live with his blindness, gaining a recording contract, courting and marrying a lovely gospel singer, and finding his own musical voice, Ray Charles must still develop as a performer, move beyond the record producers who were his early patrons, kick a heroin addiction, and somehow negotiate all the women in his life...

...Only Porter's witty lyrics and effervescent music keep the movie going...

...Such scenes seem superfluous in The Aviator, because Howard Hughes's later compulsions, especially his phobia about germs, are too surpassingly weird for any glib explanations...

...They include some childhood scenes, as if to give an obligatory Freudian gloss to the torments that bedeviled the subjects into their years of fame...

...But in the end the movie portrays Kinsey as an old-fashioned hero of science, lecturing and gathering data with a fearless indifference to his critics, shining light in dark corners, brushing away the cobwebs of ignorance and repression as he emancipates the world from a narrowminded, altogether crippling puritanism...