Selma, this year’s much-touted biopic of Martin Luther King, Jr., opens on a close-up shot of the good doctor as he self-consciously rehearses a speech in between complaining to his wife about his wardrobe—not on one of Dr. King’s legendary speeches or on some childhood tragedy that inspires his eventual triumphs in civil rights leadership. It’s not a grand moment, but it is an honest one. The film’s intimacy is immediate and enduring.
It’s surprising because, of all the great movies that hit theaters in 2014, perhaps none was easier to dismiss as trash than Selma (okay, maybe The Lego Movie); the reason being that toxic little descriptor—biopic.
It’s a word dripping with negative connotations of cheap Oscar bait and dumbed-down simplification of real-world events and people. These so-called prestige pictures clog smaller theaters and megaplexes alike come awards season—so much so that it’s easy to forget that a biopic can be more than another two hour stretch of stilted idealistic speeches, years-spanning montages, and bad old-age makeup. Recently, films like Selma and 2013’s Lincoln reminded picky viewers like myself of the biopic’s potential.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with biopics, but it’s often too easy to slip into manipulative melodrama when the opening “based on a true story” tag functions like a get-out-of-jail-free card for sloppy storytelling.
Most cinematic profiles of real-life heroes, usually musical or historical icons, are so ubiquitous that they even inspired a merciless parody in Jake Kasdan’s Walk Hard. That film’s primary target is one deserving of ridicule: the Johnny Cash-inspired Walk the Line.
Walk the Line somehow manages to make a rollicking story of sex, drugs, and country music seem tedious. Lifelong conflicts are boiled down into unconvincing dialogue scenes. Montages abound. Johnny Cash comes across as a morose prick, and the film chooses to focus on a romance whose conclusion is inevitable and painfully telegraphed.
Despite typically stellar performances from leads Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, the humorless film fails at telling a captivating story or capturing the essence of a famous figure’s life. After watching Walk the Line, one doesn’t understand Johnny Cash or his music more, so much as one wonders how and why June Carter could have put up with him.
Trying to cover a considerable chunk, even just a measly decade, of a real person’s life in one film is a fool’s errand for all but the most skilled filmmakers—Mike Leigh, who recently directed artistic biopic Mr. Turner, is among those few. Usually, however, it means trying to apply some cohesive and satisfying narrative arc to a real life—when real life simply doesn’t work that way. Thus, Walk the Line becomes a film about how a simplistic version of Johnny Cash overcomes his drug addiction, guilt, daddy issues and general assholery by virtue of June Carter’s unconditional, if often tough love.
On the other hand, a biopic can more-or-less toss narrative structures aside, like the abysmal Jobs or the recent Stephen Hawking biopic, The Theory of Everything. Again, the film is blessed with stellar lead performances and even a downright decent script that allows the central figure more facets than Walk the Line manages to give Cash. Still, it’s easy to lose interest when watching. The film, though touching at times, devolves into a series of events that happened throughout the course of a man’s life. That’s why we read Wikipedia articles, not why we watch movies.
Selma and Lincoln both gain immediate points by zeroing in on a specific point in their subjects’ lives—the former on King’s march for voting rights through rural Alabama and the latter on Lincoln’s efforts to pass the thirteenth amendment on the tail-end of the Civil War. Although both films are set during pivotal moments of history, they are still only moments. The scope is manageable, and by focusing on just one short period, the films add a thrilling immediacy to history. These are skilled men working against powerful opponents, trying to get big things done now. The implication that death is just around the corner for both is just icing on the cake.
Plus, both films convey a knowledge of what made these men so great. Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King are defined not simply by their character or their families, but by what they do—that is, after all, what made them so great in the eyes of history. The films acknowledge their characters’ flaws and personal issues—Selma’s brief scene concerning King’s infidelity is possibly one of its best—without reveling in them as Walk the Line does.
We understand Lincoln and King in new ways when we see them greasing wheels and twisting arms to accomplish their goals. They become grounded individuals who simply do their jobs really damn well, even when their methods aren’t so black-and-white. That might mean Lincoln exploiting a few Democrats to win votes or King purposely putting his people in harm’s way to make sure the news cameras are on them.
Meanwhile, Walk the Line mostly uses the world of country music to score the plentiful montages and as an inconsequential backdrop for the central love story. The Theory of Everything similarly brushes over Hawking’s achievements in science in favor of examining his deterioration and how it affects his ultimately doomed marriage. The results are moving at times, but the subjects remain elusive. Admittedly, not all biopics have subjects as fascinating or as storied as Martin Luther King or Abraham Lincoln, but the storytelling tricks employed in Selma and Lincoln still hold true.
Let’s apply the methods to Johnny Cash’s story, for example. Johnny Cash is certainly no Lincoln, but wouldn’t Walk the Line have been more interesting if the story was anchored in the early days of Sun studios, when Cash and his fellow soon-to-be superstars struggled to eat while on the cusp of fame that would corrupt them, or during the 1980s, when Cash relapsed while working against his record company and status as a wash-up? Both approaches would examine Cash as an artist and as a member of the unforgiving music-biz—again, what made him famous—while showing drug addiction in less-clichéd contexts. Both would have more immediacy as Cash faces his baser urges and works to eat and to stay relevant, or to become relevant in the first place. Both, most importantly, would have been more cohesive and compelling.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with biopics, but it’s often too easy to slip into manipulative melodrama when the opening “based on a true story” tag functions like a get-out-of-jail-free card for sloppy storytelling. Selma and Lincoln serve as welcome reminders that, when done right, biopics are an invaluable tool for bringing history to life.
