Based on a True... Nevermind

In the NY Times' Awards Season package, Dennis Lim's "Screenwriting Drafts of History" takes a look at the screenplays behind three political biopics: Milk, W. and Che. (Click each title for excerpts.) In profiling the writers behind these works -- Dustin Lance Black, Peter Buchman and Stanley Weister, respectively -- Lim touches on an issue that comes to my mind when sitting down with biopics of every flavor: "[E]ach went through a similar gantlet of intensive research but often arrived at different solutions when it came to the conundrums of biography: how to get at the private truth beneath the public person and how to reconcile the conflicting roles of fact checker and myth maker."

Of the three films, Milk may be the most standardized biopic (the inspirational underdog canonization), but for me, it's also the most accurate staging of the specific man its screenplay chooses to portray, given that (a) the demeanor and decade of Harvey Milk's life presented in the film were already meticulously detailed in Rob Epstein's remarkable, Oscar-winning doc The Times of Harvey Milk, a source for the film; (b) Milk was surrounded by great friends and colleagues who helped piece together the events for Black, even if all first-hand memories can play tricks on the truth; (c) the film concentrates far more on Milk's public persona and doings than his relationships behind closed doors. This isn't to say that events aren't fully dramatized and dialogue concocted (this is a movie, after all), but that the framing device of Milk nakedly expressing his philosophies while creating his will was literally tape recorded, there's perhaps less revisionism necessary in the recreation.

Che is also built on remembrances from family, friends and others who witnessed the upheavals in Cuba and Bolivia (as well as Che Guevara's diaries, which colored it an adapted screenplay in the Academy's eyes). But while it would be silly to gauge how much hazier the memories are from events that happened two decades prior to Milk's San Francisco years, the film also doesn't pretend to get under the revolutionary's skin. It's an ambitious formalist exercise in portraying guerilla warfare, not the humanizing of an icon that its poster campaign markets. For the film's sake, though, that's probably for the best, since there are plenty of controversial, bigoted aspects to Guevara's character that would need to be included if it were meant as a well-rounded portrait.

I won't even discuss W. much because I feel it's a missed opportunity on several fronts, and cramming a greatest-hits timeline of Dubya's screw-ups into a neatly ribbon-tied drama of daddy issues (invented dream sequence and all) renders it an ineffectual film that will likely fall through the cracks of time. It's a diverting enough dramedy (I laughed a bit), but it's mostly fascinating for some inspired casting choices and its timeliness to a sitting U.S. President. To Buchman's and Stone's credit, much like United 93, I don't think there's much potential for even an incendiary topic (in this case, the Bush presidency, not just the man) without some clarity of hindsight.

Lim covers some of this and more, but what interests me is the process of trying to portray real people played by other people, re-written by other people, filmed in other times. I mean, as entertaining as Man on the Moon was, did anyone glean anything new about Andy Kaufman? Should an imagined, quasi-biopic like Last Days be a more practiced standard? Why was Disney's Pocahontas considered more controversial than W., given that the latter is the one who is still alive (and in a position of power)? Should the fact that Howard Stern played himself in Private Parts have started a more honest trend?

More Questions for the Day:
1. Is timeliness to history more or less important than hindsight, when the memories are cloudier and the documentation less accessible?
2. Art is art, and there are no rules, but how much responsibility should screenwriters take to craft biopics as unbiased, warts-and-all portraits?
3. Is it fair to begin any film with the words "Based on (or even 'inspired by') a true story"?

Posted by ahillis at January 5, 2009 9:25 AM