Biography as film
Quentin Tarantino claims he will never direct a “bio-pic,” or at least the standard “life and times” variety. The man who killed off Hitler in a WWII action-farce correctly finds them uninteresting. This is the product of the limitations of the medium. Directors can experiment within the boundaries of the bio-pic genre, but any filmmaker aiming for an “authentic” story will be cramped by conventions of narrative and the historical record.
Films like Milk and Walk The Line offer nothing but celebrated performances by the leads. Both were nominated for academy awards. Does anyone remember their directors? Are they really just the same film “Ambitious man faces adversity but succeeds due to x.” Does that tell us anything about ourselves or our culture? Does it not merely reaffirm values and myths we all share? Oh wait, Milk dies, so the film is “tragic” and moving because its “true.” Simply because something is sad and true does not mean that ending is not a lazy cliche masquerading as “meaning.” Moviegoers hoping to see a great movie or great story-telling were left with scene-chewing leads, shabby history, stereotypical characters, and conventional plot development.
What does anyone remember about Patton save George C. Scott’s tour-de-force? Nothing in that film redefined the way war movies were made. Instead, it spawned more movies seeking to replicate its box-office by copying its methods.
The genre cannot engage a thoughtful viewer intellectually or emotionally. We are placed in awe of our subject (and our actor) and are meant to walk away admiring the man or cheering the cause. But, in doing so, all we really do is validate our own prejudices, and the experience of watching such a film renders empathy impossible. Think about it. Anyone who has a film made about their life is already extraordinary. We can watch directors recreate pivotal moments in their lives and see the choices these great men make, but those are moments the viewer can never “experience,” because he is not great and never will be. None of us understand what it is like to be at the head of an army, a movement, or possess any discernible talent. As viewers, we simply watch actors go through the motions of stories we know in a style that has become so hackneyed as to beckon parody.
This is not to say there are not bio-pics I do not value. Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and Oliver Stone’s Nixon remain two of my favorite films. The former might be more faithful to the life of William Randolph Hearst than the latter is to what the books say about thirty-seventh president. But this does not matter. They are psychological studies more concerned with the tragedy of power and the paradox of the American Dream. In this sense, they play like Greek tragedies that the Romans, or at least Livy, might recognize as history, which is to say, they are instructive tales borrowing equally from legend and fact that are designed to impart moral lessons to the audience.
But they fail as history as we currently understand the discipline and suffered attacks as biased, inaccurate, or flat-out wrong. Stone and Welles were less interested in fitting their stories to chronologies and checking footnotes than making statements about ideologies and myths that shape how every thoughtful person born in this country considers the goals and aspirations of their life. Stone’s W. fails as history and drags when it merely hits check marks on George W. Bush’s life, but proves gripping drama when it returns to the father-son dynamic because the tension between parent and child is a universal experience that the audience understands. Bush’s story, as told by Stone, is compelling to the audience when it is a story of personal development and family.
One of my favorite movies as a child was Truman, an HBO film starring Gary Sinise as our thirty-third president. I can summon long stretches of dialogue verbatim. The movie moves briskly through the life and times of the Missouri farmer turned soldier turned politician turned senator turned president. The film draws its inspiration from David McCullough’s Truman, the Pulitzer Prize winning autobiography. Both McCullough’s book and its silver screen adaptation appeal primarily because their subject was presented as an honest everyman who finds himself in power and performs admirably. Truman exists in our popular consciousness as the president we all think we would be should power fall on us one day - hard-working, honest, just, and determined.
As biography. McCullough’s Truman ranks among the best of recent memory, certainly among the most influential. McCullough is a first-rate stylist, but with Truman he was blessed with a subject who left much of his own “voice” behind in diaries and letters. In short, Truman is a monograph that is effortless to read and easier to enjoy.
I am going to bed. I am going to write about the strengths and weakness of biography as “history” focusing on Truman, and contrasting its approach with political memoirs and, finally, with Barton Gellman’s Angler, the recent Pulitzer Prize biography of Vice President Dick Cheney that offers quite a few anecdotes on the “Dark Side” and its utility as a “political” argument. Finally, I will assess them all against Plutarch’s rubric on biography established in his “Life of Alexander.” Writing about Angler was my original goal, but I got sidetracked, obviously.
Part II up whenever.
