Biopics
Man, biopics must be hard to write. It’s one thing to write a biography book, even with a sort of novelistic “creative nonfiction” approach. Among other things, a book with an unlimited page count can create a much richer portrait of an entire life. It can also, if done with that creative nonfiction approach, play more with the fluidity of time. An important, well-known incident in the subject’s life can spur remembrances of insignificant, unknown moments that might have led to the event. Biopics are almost always framed with a flashback structure, but cinematic flashbacks can (and often do) make things cumbersome. They pose the question, “What led to this moment?” but it takes anywhere from 20 minutes to three hours to answer the question. In a book, it doesn’t have to be more than a paragraph or two. “Remember this? It reminded her of that.” The end.
Biopics have the more difficult task of trying to encompass a person’s entire existence into feature length. I had similar problems with The Final Cut, but at least a screenwriter can just take an overview of a life and condense it down in some way or another. But if someone’s led a ridiculously eventful life, you don’t have many options in crafting a screenplay. As I see it, you can either try to dramatize each of these moments, or you can concentrate on one important moment and try to use that as an emblem of the full life.
The former strategy runs the risk of information overload, with no dramatic thrust, so it feels like we’re watching a series of scenes rather than a story; at worst, it makes us feel like we never get to know the subject despite it being a movie about the subject. I felt this way about recent critical darlings Ray and Walk the Line — good performances aside, both felt more like watching a greatest-moments reel than a dramatic story. The latter tends to have a solid story, but it runs the risk of not even qualifying as a biopic; it also might still leave the central character as an enigma because the filmmakers assume we can fill in our own blanks about the subject’s life before or after the incident in question. I had this problem with Capote, which actually works better as a biopic of In Cold Blood than Truman Capote, who remains a mystery until some painfully on-the-nose dialogue near the end (despite giving us some insight into the character, the clumsy handling makes the movie worse, not better). Becoming Jane takes this same general idea while making a significantly better (albeit not great) movie by concentrating on her early romantic life and illustrating how it impacted her writing.
The only recent biopic I’ve liked as a pure movie experience was La vie en rose. Although it spans the bulk of her life, it never feels like it’s breezily moving from one moment to the next without taking the time to get into the character’s head and let us understand her. It also plays with time in ways that are more effective than the standard “present-day reflections on an eventful life” — the filmmakers wisely make the structure as frazzled and frenetic as Piaf’s life/mind. Yet, it plays so loose with Édith Piaf’s life, it barely qualifies as a biopic and would be better off as a fiction inspired by Piaf.
In order to really understand what’s wrong with most biopics, first, I think, we need to figure out what the hell a biopic is. As I said, some of the best movies about real-life figures aren’t exactly biographies. For instance, I love American Splendor, but does it even qualify? It consists primarily of adaptations of Harvey Pekar’s comics, which Pekar even admits on the film’s audio commentary were idealized or, in some cases, pure fiction. I love Quiz Show, too, but despite having such vivid characters and such a solid story, it’s not a biography of Charles Van Doren, Herb Stempel, Dick Goodwin, or anyone else involved in the scandal. Like Capote, it’s a dramatization of a brief moment in time.
I’d qualify the typical “reflective flashback” structure as a hallmark of the genre, but some biopics don’t have that at all (Capote), while Oscar-magnet Amadeus employed it despite being almost as fictitious as La vie en rose. Even when you win, you lose. It’s also hard to argue that Capote or Amadeus don’t want to be biopics — they have the subject’s name in the goddamn title — despite only showing a few years in their lives.
For me, the bottom-line qualifications are these:
- It must encompass the subject’s life.
I don’t mean showing the entire life, beat by beat, although that qualifies. It’s a biopic even if the filmmakers take a snippet of the subject’s life but are using that snippet to symbolize the life as a whole. Arguing whether or not this is the filmmaker’s intent is admittedly subjective, but usually signs are there (does it employ a flashback framing device? does it have a series of title cards at the end explaining what happened to the people involved?). From my perspective, if you walk out of the movie saying, “Wow, I really feel like I get that person’s life,” it’s a biopic; if you’re saying, “Wow, I really get the Cuban missile crisis,” it’s…not.
- It must purport to be a true story about an actual person’s life.
Let’s deconstruct the sentence! “Purport” is the key word there since, as mentioned, films like La vie en rose and Amadeus qualify as biopics, yet they’re riddled with omissions, half-truths, and outright lies. “A true story” as opposed to “the true story,” which to me suggests only the broad, birth-to-death portrait of a life rather than the calmer, five-years-to-encompass-a-life structure. And, of course, it must be true. The Cat’s Meow, for instance, can’t qualify as anything because it’s a work of fiction about real people, based on a real incident, yet Peter Bogdanovich has said in no uncertain terms that it’s a work of speculative fiction that has little basis in reality. Conversely, a biopic must tell the story of an actual person — fake biopics like Citizen Kane and Forrest Gump don’t count. Shocking, I know.
Of course, these two are mutually inclusive: if you only have the former, it suggests that the subject is fictitious or that it’s an untrue story of real people (like Dick, a great but completely untrue comedy about Watergate, or Day of the Jackal, about a fictitious assassination attempt on real French president Charles de Gaulle); if you have only the latter, it must be something like Quiz Show or Thirteen Days, true stories with actual people that aren’t actually about the people so much as the events they took part in. Make sense? I hope it does, because my own head is spinning.
What’s all this leading up to? Well, at the beginning of October, the Brian Wilson biopic landed on my desk, and I sneered at it. I expected it to be the bottom rung of biopic crappiness, scraping the dregs of Ray or Walk the Line or Great Balls of Fire, all the way back to Yankee Doodle Dandy, mining every cliché of the genre without coming close to illustrating why Wilson is interesting enough to warrant a biopic. Selfishly, I had that jealous-screenwriter mentality that only I can write the true, great Brian Wilson biopic, because only I really get him, maaaan. I also had a bit of concern because I knew of Wilson’s own involvement with the project — I assumed it’d gloss over the bad vibes and be overly self-indulgent, or it’d just be terrible because the man is still fairly gone.
I was absolutely wrong on all accounts. To my surprise, screenwriter Michael Lerner did exactly what I think a good biopic should do: he showed the man, warts and all, but covered a section of Brian’s life that — while significant — might not be quite as well-known. Lerner ignores their garage days, their rise to popularity, the drug experimentation (often alluded to, sometimes shown), Brian’s musical development (both as songwriter and producer). Instead, he concentrates on the more mysterious, “nutjob” section of Brian’s life.
Most people know the man went nuts; they don’t know he spent many years under the iron fist of therapist/exploiter Eugene Landy. Lerner doesn’t portray Brian as perfect, and he doesn’t portray Landy as a cartoonish villain (he reserves that for a deserving Mike Love). Everybody is a few shades more complex than what I’m used to seeing in both biopics and psychological thrillers (a genre the story, at times, resembles). Brian manages to come across as sweet and disarmingly funny, despite his clear psychological damage. He’s also shown as a tormented genius, often lapsing into a haze of musical insanity. His ex-wife wants nothing to do with him (and neither does his band, after several high-profile flops), he terrifies his children, he looks and smells like a bum, and by the end, Landy actually has helped him — just enough for Brian to get away from him. Landy comes across as deeply troubled himself, a man who’s torn between a genuine desire to help Brian and the easy exploitation to live out Landy’s own musical dreams. (Not surprisingly, Landy is largely responsible for “Smart Girls,” likely penning the lyrics and mixing it himself.)
The advantage of concentrating on (roughly) a 15-year period in Brian’s life lets Lerner have some breathing room to develop these characters. In addition to rounding out Brian and Landy, he does a great job at showing the difficult relationship Brian had with brother Dennis; like Brian, Dennis was a sweet but completely fucked-up guy, and although he wanted the best for Brian, he ended up as more of a corrupter than a helper. After such shitty Beach Boys biopics on TV, it’s amazing to find a rich, nuanced perspective on relationships like these.
Meanwhile, Brian’s relationship with Melinda Ledbetter (his current wife) is a little problematic. Narratively, it drives the second and third acts, almost turning the script into a love story, but I think there might be a little historical revisionism happening. I have no doubt that she had a big impact on Brian, but by the end, we’re expected to believe Landy had no positive impact on Brian — it was all Melinda! — when I’d argue that Landy helped Brian more than anyone’s willing to recognize now. Lerner plays this as deliberately ambiguous, possibly because it’s difficult to reconcile these two opposing perspectives and still give the characters the complexity they deserve. There’s a domino effect that Lerner puts into place, then tries to make us forget: Landy helps Brian enough to allow him to get out into the world, so he can meet Melinda, so Melinda can give him the final push to break him free of Landy, who’s no longer helping.
The closing Smile section also doesn’t quite work; I’d argue that if they cut directly from Brian having Landy’s medical license revoked to the Smile debut, the whole third act would flow much better. Lerner opts to show snippets of the intervening years, giving it an annoying “biopic” feel as he rushes through important scenes to get to the moment of triumph. I hope those scenes are cut before the film’s release.
Despite the flaws, this is what a biopic should be: the essence of a person’s life, omitting details average moviegoers will know in favor of what they don’t know, with a compelling dramatic story shaping it. The moments of a full life don’t tell a perfect, birth-to-death dramatic story. The only one I can think of is Oedipus Rex, who is inconveniently fictional. Heroes & Villains has a functional dramatic story: Brian Wilson is an insane loser who has alienated everyone he knows, so his family puts him under the experimental treatment of a doctor who may or may not be more insane. Landy gradually reveals himself to be an exploitative jackass right around the time Brian gets hooked up with Melinda Ledbetter, who helps him break free. If you want to get all symbolic and shit, both Landy and Brian’s non-Dennis family represent both the internal and external “villains” Brian spends the movie trying to escape.
Compare this to the biopic of a 75-year-old jewel thief, whose extraordinarily eventful life occupied another script I was forced to read. Sadly, while I do think this woman’s story is worth telling, it’s…not told well. At all. The problem, not surprisingly, lies in screenwriter Eunetta T. Boone’s decision to cover all 75 years of her life. (Okay, that’s not fair — the story actually starts with her at age 13, so it’s only 62 years.)
Trying to cram everything into a 126-page screenplay gives it that rushed feeling that irritates me so much. It’s especially bad because this woman is not Johnny Cash or Ray Charles; people will give those movies a pass because they know enough to fill in the quality gaps. Only Oprah watchers know who this woman is, so seeing a life story so glossed over benefits no one, least of all its subject. Even more strangely, what the screenplay tries to use as its dramatic hook — the notion that she steals because it’s the only thing she can do to support her kids — crumbles to pieces by the midpoint, when we realize (a) she has stolen more than enough to live a pleasant, upper-middle-class lifestyle and (b) we only get a few glimpses of her with the kids, and she’s never shown as a particularly caring or doting mother; also, the kids all but disappear from the story in the second half.
This manipulation of motivation fails the story because we never get to understand what really drives her. What really makes her steal? Even if she was just lying to herself by saying it was for her kids, shouldn’t she have to confront that denial and come to some realizations about who she is as a person? She doesn’t just steal, either — the scope and ambition escalate despite her relative wealth. It’s a fascinating mindset to get to know and understand, so it was really frustrating to see the motives so poorly simplified.
Worse than that, because Boone tries to cover so much ground, she essentially ends up telling three stories that, if fleshed out separately, would make good movie stories; when crammed together, they add up to something hovering around mediocre. First, you have the story of a desperate mother driven to extremes to support her kids; then, you have the story of two criminals — one an African-American woman, the other a white Jewish man — trying to maintain a relationship in the middle of the civil rights movement; finally, there’s the “international” portion of her thieving career, which plays a bit like Ocean’s Twelve, only worse. And I haven’t even mentioned the comically extraneous FBI agent who pops up randomly to say he’s tracking her, even though he doesn’t really do anything to catch her.
So what’s my wish for this script? Pick one story and tell it well. Since the desperate mother angle flops big-time, and the international stuff is pretty retarded, I’d go with the civil rights one — it’s the closest thing to compelling drama that this script has, but it moves at such a rapid gait, it loses the impact it should have had.
As a final note, I have to acknowledge that many of these biopic concepts are bought by producers and written by hired guns — meaning, they have to tailor the script to what the producer wants. So if a producer says, “I want the entire life story of this 75-year-old jewel thief,” poor Boone has to work within an impossible framework. I don’t know if this is how it worked in either situation (although I’m pretty sure it’s the case with both scripts), but it’s something worth taking into account.
Seriously, though, biopics are rough, even on spec, and I don’t envy anyone with the task of condensing the life of an interesting person into a 110-page movie story. Most biopics are total shit — aside from typically good performances — so while I have some hope for the Brian Wilson movie, this other one will be just as thunderously mediocre as most.
Posted by Stan on November 17, 2008 4:59 PM | Permalink | How Not to Write a Screenplay | Digg It
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