3 posts tagged “biopics”
The musical biopic has enjoyed such success as a genre only because the filmmaker autobiopic isn't yet a marketable option. So much ego and artistic masturbation is poured into the genre's masterworks, whether it's Taylor Hackford's Ray or last year's love letter to layered appreciation, I'm Not There (Todd Haynes).
OK, to be fair, I haven't seen I'm Not There yet. Maybe it's good.
Anton Corbijn's Control is the story of Ian Curtis, lead singer of Joy Division. And for a film about a band that's as consequential as they were, Control is surprisingly tolerable.
Sam Riley is Ian, the unknowable and ultimately doomed genius, while Samantha Morton is his wife Deborah. And that's key. Because while most musical biopics relegate the bedraggled first wife to a supporting role in the first twenty minutes (a trope that Kristin Wiig worked magic with in Walk Hard), Deborah Curtis looms large in Control, larger than Ian at times.
Most of what I know about Joy Division comes from listening to their progeny (Interpol, et al.) and from Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People, so I don't come to this with the baggage that some might. But neither does Corbijn, I'd argue, and that's a hell of a feat considering the fact that he directed videos for them. While Joy Division's music is central, of course, it never steals the spotlight from character. In Walk The Line, we get to watch the supposedly history-of-musical-expression-altering moment that Johnny Cash momentously farted out the title song. There's much less of that bullshit here. The music exists, and it is great, but no sequences are built around explicating it, and the film is more concerned with the relationship between Ian and Deborah. The black and white photography is gorgeous, and the film fails to indulge in the "wages of fame" self-pity that's so prevalent these days that it's invisible. Control would almost work if it were complete fiction, a litmus test that should be applied to prevent the next fake memoir debacle.
I say "almost" because there's still that whole romantic doomed artist thing. But when Control veers too close to that brink, Samantha Morton pulls us back. Cause she's just the shit, and her work gives Deborah Curtis the weight that she, and many other put-upon first wives of asshole musicians, richly deserve.
There's a scene in Taylor Hackford's Ray that makes me want to kill people. The very blind Ray Charles (Jamie Foxx) is sitting in a restaurant with a woman, and he proceeds to impress her by noticing the sound of the hummingbird just outside the window... across the restaurant. Y'see, he's blind, but his other sense are heightened.
He's not a goddamn superhero. He's a blind person.
The rock biopics of the past few years, namely Ray and James Mangold's Walk The Line (but let's not forget Kevin Spacey's ludicrously reverent Beyond The Sea) are such self-important nonsense, and they're often universally acclaimed. Critics and the public fall all over themselves praising the lead actors for what amount to impressions. I'm not necessarily saying that Foxx, Spacey, and Joaquin Phoenix don't give fine performances (they don't), I'm saying that critics seem incapable of recognizing the fact that performances which can be measured against the concrete evidence of history seem to get a lot more consistently favorable attention than those by actors who must create characters from scratch. Think of Cate Blanchett's ridiculous Oscar win for her performance as Katherine Hepburn in The Aviator. Blanchett's been nominated two other times, once for Elizabeth (of whom we have no footage), and once for Notes on a Scandal. She wins for a silly accent that makes people feel good about "Hollywood royalty", but she loses for the performance of her career, which just happens to be of a middle class schoolteacher. And who took home the best acting trophies that year? Forest Whitaker for The Last King of Scotland and Helen Mirren for The Queen. The old joke is that if you play a retarded person, you'll definitely get an Oscar nod, but I think it's clear that the times they are a-changin'; famous people are the new retards.
But anyway, back to music biopics specifically. They are by and large terrible, and they do well because people like to hear songs that they know and watch famous people do impressions of other famous people.
So my heart leapt when I saw the first trailer for Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, in which John C. Reilly plays the titular fictional rock legend. You mean there are others who can't stand these movies? In the vein of Anchorman and the underrated Talladega Nights (which I love on many levels), Jake Kasdan's new film holds the Judd Apatow approved mirror of schlubby irreverence up to a particularly offensive kind of cultural institution.
Yes, it's a one joke movie, the joke being that the musical biopic is a ridiculous genre. Kasdan hits all the tropes square on the head, from the dead brother to the bedraggled first wife to the moment of musical reckoning as Dewey is forced to change the course of rock history in fifteen seconds or less. Somebody telegraphs the meaning of every scene at least once (Jenna Fischer's wide-eyed "The sixties are an important and exciting time, Dewey!" is my favorite), and the film really captures the dull, checklist feel of the musical biopic.
So it's a one joke movie. But that joke is hilarious.
Wait, I lied. It's a two joke movie. The first of these jokes has to do with the hacky narrative construction of the music biopic, and the other joke is that blowjobs are funny. Really... there are a lot of blowjob jokes. A distracting amount of blowjob jokes.
John C. Reilly has been one of my favorite actors for as long as I've been paying attention to these things, and he was always able to lend an endearing, clueless humor to his characters. But this performance, the natural extension of his summer internship at Talladega Nights, is a great accomplishment, sometimes just as sincere and as lovely as Ferrell's work in Elf (Ferrell doesn't have a Hard Eight under his belt, so I think John C. wins that one). The songs are great; "Royal Jelly", for which Dewey is accused of stealing his sound from Bob Dylan, is a standout. And as with many of these comedies, there are a lot of cameos, and the expected comedy cameos seem to fill the role that the historically important characters serve in the music biopics. It's a nice fit for the two genres, including a hilariously incompatible stand-in for Paul McCartney.
Unfortunately, Walk Hard is just as servile to the formula as the films it's skewering. By sticking so close to the biopic template (and hey, that's your joke, you have to do it), it robs itself of the opportunities that the Apatow-produced Anchorman took advantage of, like the famous impromptu "Afternoon Delight" sequence. There's a lot of music in Walk Hard, but too little of the film has that same feeling of off-the-rails pathos, if only because we know where it's going and how it's going to get there. We've seen it all before.
Like A Mighty Wind before it, Walk Hard is just this side of too affectionate towards its subject, favoring the earnestness of its leads over real evisceration.
Still, while it wasn't the second coming of Christ I was hoping for (still waiting, Jesus), you can't argue with John C. Reilly singing lyrics like "Rim-job fairy teapots mask the temper tantrum, Oh say can ya see 'em?" There's a whole lot to love about Walk Hard, and so love it I will.
Rent
(Chris Columbus, 2005)
I stand so far outside of understanding what the hell is going on here. This is not made for me and certainly doesn't bring me into the fold.
Memoirs of a Geisha
(Rob Marshall, 2005)
Maybe I would care about this if the people spoke Japanese, but as it stands it feels like the actors don't know what they're saying. Things fall apart from there.
Walk The Line
(James Mangold, 2005)
People like to hear songs that they know. Reese Witherspoon does her best work since Freeway. It sucks less than Ray (which sucks so much), but it's still a mess.
Derailed
(Mikael Håfström, 2005)
Satisfying like a set of Legos and just as nourishing. Don't eat Legos.
