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Tuesday, January 25, 2005Stranger than Fiction?
On the morn' of the Academy Award nomination announcements (no, I was not nominated), I've been thinking of how much I don't like bio pics.
Sure, The Aviator was okay -- not 11 noms okay. And Kinsey was interesting. But I always get to the end of films like these and feel like "so what?" No matter how much fictionalizing goes into these biographies, there's too much truth in them for me. Now, there's good truth and there's bad truth. Good truth is an awareness that is created in the mind of a reader/viewer. It is an emotion. An extreme. A revelation. An understanding. A secret. Bad truth is an invented convention that attempts to address "what really happens." Objectivity. Why is this so important to people? Why must we throttle ourselves with a governor on imagination? Truth is never really stranger than fiction. "Truth," in this sense, is a crutch to prop up sensationalist "fiction." I want movies to live on in my mind, in the same way that the most important part of a comic book happens between the panels. When I see a movie like The Aviator, and I go home to read that Howard Hughes was married before he met Hepburn or worse that he made two movies before Hell's Angels and BOTH of them won Academy Awards ... well, all of a sudden, I feel cheated. And I'm left with a skeleton of arbitrary facts that don't register any emotions. Time for another cup of coffee... // posted at
8:58 AM //
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1 Comments:
If your argument is that there is no intrinsic value in objectivity in art and movie making, I would disagree with that at times, based upon context and the film maker's intent. If, however, your argument is that objective "truth" rarely results in good movies, I'd agree with you wholeheartedly.
Two examples of successful movies based on true stories are, in my mind, Black Hawk Down and The Perfect Storm. It's worth noting, however, that The Perfect Storm is entirely conjecture once the boat leaves the harbor, except for the few radio message that can be attested by Capt. Greenhorne. The story of what happens on the boat, including the conflict between the two fishermen and the way it eventually is "resolved," is entirely good fictionalization based upon experience with swordfishermen. So this story is to an almost overwhelming extent actually very effective fiction.
Black Hawk Down is another imperfect counterexample because it is a war movie, and war stories are somewhat intrinsically compelling. And even this story, as exhaustively researched and authenticated as it is (if you've read the book, you know that the author collaborated every event as fully as possible with alternate witnesses), must by its nature contain some license, or there would be precious little dialog.
The real point, then, is that biography rarely makes good cinema, Shakespeare notwithstanding. I could not agree more completely with this assertion (you gotta love how I'm putting words into Jim's Mac). I have not seen The Aviator, but it's going to take alot of omission to turn Howard Hughes into the kind of guy that audiences can consider a protagonist, or at least relate to. I'm guessing that when you make that type of a film, you have to decide which facts are most relevant and omit the others out of hand, or you end up with David Lynch's Dune, since there will be too much stuff to cram into there and some of it will tend to be contradictory.
"He's gonna lock himself up in his room..."
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