Biopics
One major source of films is the lives of real people—important historical figures, famous athletes, movie stars, novelists, politicians, musicians, even ordinary people whose stories are somehow inspiring or worth telling for their larger meaning. There’s a kind of movie for this—the biopic, which obviously combines the word “biography” with “picture.” Because so many biopics are based on famous or well-known people, I bet you can identify the subjects of these movies without me naming them or giving you the titles.
Biopics create drama out of the real experiences of their subjects, which necessitates some structuring of those experiences into narrative. Often, these kinds of films are drawn from written biographies or autobiographies, or, they are done with the cooperation of the film’s subject or their family members, which lend them the air of authenticity. If the subject of the biopic is well known to the general public, steps are often taken to shape the actors’ looks to adhere to that public familiarity; compare these images of the real Malcolm X and Denzel Washington, who played him in Spike Lee’s film Malcolm X (1992).
Some effort is usually made to achieve this kind of authentic representation of the person, with actors using special makeup or changing their voices in some way (adopting accents, for example) to make themselves seem more like the people they are playing. That kind of visual authenticity often substitutes for careful attention to the actual lives of the biopic’s subject, which have to be adapted to fit into a dramatic situation. The way scenes are shaped in writing, both at the structural level and in dialogue, have to be malleable. Maybe Event A actually happened a year after Event B, but if the narrative makes more sense for them to be switched, then some filmmakers will make the switch. On the level of individual scenes, who’s to say what someone said? There was no written transcript, for instance, of what Dick Cheney said to his wife while they were in bed one night, so in Vice (2018), writer/director Adam McKay has them speak in iambic pentameter, like Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. In doing so, McKay embraces and calls attention to the uncertainty—rather than attempt to write a realistic scene, he writes one that feels emotionally correct for what he wants to communicate about his subject.
Biopics shape our perceptions of real people because we are vulnerable to the way that those people are portrayed on screen. But, they require fictionalization. It’s inevitable. The question is whether the use of a real person’s story demands any special responsibility on the part of the filmmaker—should they stay as close as possible to what really happened, or does that not matter?
Biopic - Snowden
Oliver Stone’s Snowden (2016) is about as serious a film as you could imagine. Stone is one of the filmmakers most associated with conspiratorial thinking and the conspiracy film more specifically, mostly thanks to his 1991 film JFK, which posited a conspiracy in the assassination of the president. Snowden, which is based on the true story of the government whistleblower who, after working for the NSA and CIA as an intelligence contractor, exposed the United States’ data collection practices, which went far beyond what had been publicly known before his revelations in June 2013. Ideologically, Stone is entirely sympathetic to Edward Snowden, portrayed in the film by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. The decision by the actor to mimic almost exactly Snowden’s distinctive voice lends the film a degree of authenticity, as does its use of digital cinematography during some moments in Snowden’s Hong Kong hotel room, meant to be the images captured by the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (played in the film by Melissa Leo) on her camera. Stone is making the film just a few years after Snowden’s revelations, making their concerns seem immediate and relevant to contemporary audiences.
Bringing someone’s life to the screen is a very difficult task because it requires dramatization; not every single moment of a person’s life can be staged, which demands narrative acceleration. In life, events do not always have a clear chain of causality, but drama relies on it to make sense—each scene needs to lead to the next one. In Snowden, Stone uses the structure of melodrama, as he did in JFK, to tell his protagonist’s story. As portrayed in the film, Snowden is an idealist whose belief in the moral rectitude of his government, given patriotic fervor after 9/11, is slowly eroded through his exposure to the intelligence community’s abuses of power. This is in keeping with the real Edward Snowden, who describes a similar ideological journey during his time working for the national security state. But Hollywood melodrama is further aided by Stone’s heavy attention to Snowden’s romantic relationship with girlfriend Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley), which is tempestuous and put under constant pressure because of the demands of secrecy that his job requires. These twin narrative structures echo those of Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) in JFK, whose faith in the country is similarly destroyed the more he delves into the conspiracy theory to kill the president and places his marriage to Liz (Sissy Spacek) in jeopardy. Through melodrama, Stone narrates his ideological concerns with a recognizable film genre and shapes the life of the real Edward Snowden into a character arc that an audience can digest over a roughly two-hour period.
Watch the commentary at right, which focuses on Stone’s use of conspiracy thriller style, which he himself expanded with his innovations in JFK. In this scene, the style is a bit more straightforward than the highly speculative approach he took in that film, but includes a variety of film techniques that raise and release tension. As you watch, consider how the high drama of suspense in this sequence shapes your perception of Snowden the person.
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Biopics make an assertion—this person is significant in some way. In the case of important historical figures, their actions are often contested, which means that film versions of their lives must make choices about how to interpret their actions. Real people may object to the way that film versions portray them, or, in some cases, they may even participate in the project themselves as a way of guarding their reputations. But in each case, filmmakers are deciding how they view their subject, and in turn, shaping how we perceive them. After the Snowden revelations, many members of the media and the political establishment asked a question: is Snowden a hero or a traitor? This question is remarkably reductive, and a reflection of the simplicity of political thinking that papers over nuance and is meant to shut off a thoughtful approach to what he did and what he revealed. However, there can be no doubt where the film stands: to Stone, Snowden is absolutely a hero.
Here’s how you know. Look at this pair of images from one of the film’s most important scenes, in which Snowden’s mentor Corbin O’Brian (Rhys Ifans) appears on a screen in a conference room for a talk.
Ifans’s performance throughout the film is very specifically couched; O’Brian is not a noble bureaucrat doing his best to move through the intelligence community. He is never shown to have any qualms about the data collection they are doing, and Ifans gives the character a sinister edge through his vocal performance and line deliveries that make Corbin into a pure villain, an impression underlined heavily by this scene, in which he, a manifestation of American power, appears on an enormous screen. The depiction of Corbin, whose face takes up the entire wall, dwarfs Snowden and deliberately echoes the novel 1984 by George Orwell; Corbin is the personification of Big Brother.
By contrast, Snowden himself is portrayed as a noble man who sacrifices the comforts of a job, security, and a romantic relationship with a woman he loves to expose the truth. The appearance in the film’s conclusion of the real Edward Snowden, given lines of dialogue that commemorate his own opinions on his moral choice, is clearly the movie aligning itself with his point of view.
Clip quiz - Biopics
Review the following clips and answer the questions in Blackboard.
VAN GOGH (1991, Pialat)
Describe the Van Gogh that you see in this clip from Van Gogh, directed by French filmmaker Maurice Pialat. As portrayed by actor Jacques Dutronc, what aspects of the painter’s personality do you see emphasized? Be specific. |
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LUST FOR LIFE (1956, Minnelli)
In Lust For Life, director Vincente Minnelli and actor Kirk Douglas dramatize one of the most significant incidents in Van Gogh’s life, which is his severing of his own ear. What is the interpretation offered of this event in this clip? |
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DREAMS (1991, Kurosawa)
In Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams, he includes a scene where a Japanese man encounters Van Gogh (played by Martin Scorsese) in a field composing a painting. Because this is based on a dream Kurosawa had, the typical rules of biopics go by the wayside. How does the scene create an impression of Van Gogh? What is its vision of him and how does it achieve it? |
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Biopics - At eternity's gate
One of the most celebrated artists in all of human history, the painter Vincent Van Gogh has been the subject of a number of film treatments of his life and works. You’ve surely seen representations of his work, whether you’ve been to a museum, done a quick Google image search, or flipped through a rack of posters in a store at a shopping mall. Some of the most famous paintings are below:
One thing that should stand out to you about these images is their unique, vibrant use of color. Van Gogh, a Dutchman who lived from 1853 to 1890, when he died of a gunshot wound that was likely self-inflicted, was an Impressionist painter. Essentially, he filtered his experience of reality through his own subjectivity, which comes through in the highly expressive use of colors and shapes in his work. Here’s a portrait of Van Gogh, which he painted himself, alongside an image of actor Willem Dafoe, who portrays Van Gogh in the 2018 biopic At Eternity's Gate, directed by painter and filmmaker Julien Schnabel.
No audio or video recordings of Van Gogh exist, obviously. That absence means that as an actor inhabiting this real person, Willem Dafoe is relatively free to interpret the character’s voice and mannerisms as he sees fit. In a biopic, actors are often held to a standard of look, sound, and feel—do these actors recall the real person they’re playing? In fact, this can often be something of a pitfall for them to avoid. Can they create a real character, instead of simply lapsing into an impression of a well-known person? In the case of Van Gogh, Dafoe is freed from that potential trap, and is free to imbue his version of the Impressionist painter with whatever he feels best serves the character. In this way, Van Gogh ceases to be a real person, and becomes an interpretation of a character inhabited by Dafoe. Casting makes a big difference here, too. As an actor, audiences associate Dafoe with a certain kind of artistic commitment from his history of working with independent filmmakers, but also on-screen madness from the litany of psychotic villains he’s played in a variety of films. Those facts are enough to make you overlook that Dafoe was almost thirty years too old to play Van Gogh.
As Van Gogh, Dafoe brings a certain intensity to the role that is ultimately rooted in history. As the painter’s apparent suicide might suggest, he consistently struggled with mental health throughout his life. The most notorious incident of Van Gogh’s life came when, in 1888, he suffered a breakdown and sliced off his own ear; he was subsequently hospitalized in the 1880s France version of an in-patient facility. This dramatic episode is actually excluded from At Eternity’s Gate, despite the obvious narrative excitement it represents. Instead of showing it take place, the film shows Van Gogh’s preceding breakdown, and then cuts to a scene where he has a conversation with a doctor, his head wrapped in bandages. The film even largely avoids showing the wound itself, instead sticking simply to the physician’s sketch of the missing ear on a notepad, which it shows in close-up.
Any biopic has to wrestle with what its interpretation of its subject will be; this is especially the case when the subject’s life has been previously brought to the screen by other filmmakers. What is to differentiate At Eternity’s Gate from the other film versions of Van Gogh’s life and career? What justifies its existence?
At one level, the film is simply trying to inhabit the point of view of its central character, a painter who saw the world quite differently from almost anyone else. It attempts to adopt his idiosyncratic view of his environment visually, first suffusing the film with the same kinds of bold, vibrant colors of the natural environment that inspired him in his paintings. Scenes of artistic passion are rendered in bold greens, blues, and yellows, all of which feature prominently in his paintings.
But the visual narration doesn’t end there. The camera’s restless, searching style accomplishes two psychological goals simultaneously, which are to both capture the intensity and creative energy of Van Gogh’s artistic brilliance, but also his struggle with mental illness. Because the stylistic pattern accounts for both aspects of Van Gogh’s personality, the use of it also suggests that there is link between the two things. In a conversation with his friend and competitor Paul Gauguin (Oscar Isaac), Van Gogh says, “I want to be out of control. I need to be in a feverish state.” In At Eternity’s Gate, Van Gogh’s greatest moments of creative inspiration come from his most desperate struggles, a dynamic that the character himself is able to articulate.
The best biopics transcend a simple restaging of the most significant events in a person’s life, and don’t forget that they are movies, also—stories of their own with ideas they are interested in and things they want to say. In At Eternity’s Gate, the filmmakers and cast seem to be wrestling with the idea of immortality; that’s what the title suggests, after all. Can artists live forever through their work? The film’s Van Gogh believes so. In painting a bouquet of flowers in a vase, he tries to freeze their beauty at a moment in time, forever protecting their spirit from their inevitable withering. He tries to help natural things live forever, and in so doing, achieves immortality for himself.
The lives of real people have long been material for filmmakers, going back to the beginning of cinema. It is important to make a distinction, however, between biopics like these and documentaries, which are ostensibly non-fiction films that purport to tell the truth. Biopics are, on the other hand, ultimately fictionalized. Through the use of dramatic tools, they present the lives of significant people on screen, but are ultimately telling a story that is shaped to have a specific meaning. In a sense, biopics supply a clear narrative framework to human lives, which don’t always fit into one so easily.