BIOPICS
It seems to me that BIOPICS are one of the hardest genres to nail. There are just so many pitfalls to avoid with this – extremely well-worn – genre.
Some of those pitfalls –
Name-dropping / name-checking.
By which I mean the trope where famous names are dropped into the conversation – and the fact that a character is someone famous – or will go on to become famous – apparently justifies their presence – This blog was partly inspired / triggered by recently seeing LEE – Kate Winslet as war photographer Lee Miller. A minor character in the film is Cecil Beaton, with whom Lee Miller worked at some newspaper (I forget which). But as I was watching I felt the weight of expectation when he walked through a scene and his name was dropped into the conversation, ‘Oh that’s Cecil… Cecil Beaton.’ I feel like I was supposed to go, ‘Oh wow, THE Cecil Beaton!’ Even though he really had no real relevance to Lee Miller’s story.
Exposition interviews.
An often-used device. And in this film, Josh O’Connor plays the role of interviewer to Lee Miller. There are many scenes where they sit facing each other from their sofas, he asking her about her life, she starting to describe moments, events – and then we go into flashback with voiceover. There is a big reveal at the end of the film that (tries to justify) this hoary, over-obviously expositional device. But the justification / reveal comes too late and doesn’t stop it being an over-familiar and narratively undynamic device.
(Sidebar – not specifically about BIOPICS but about dramatic storytelling more generally. There IS a place for that huge surprise reveal at the end of the story but sometimes it feels like the effectiveness and integrity of a story has been compromised by the writer’s desire to artificially hold back key information for the sake of this massive reveal. I would say in most cases, it’s better to focus on the characters and their story, to NOT withhold information in a way that feels overly artificial and teasing, lay your narrative cards on the table. If your story is strong enough, it shouldn’t need this artificially withheld reveal. Of course, every single story should be judged on its own unique merits – but I feel like some massive reveals come at the expense of the story – and that was certainly the case – IMO – in LEE.)
Jeff Nicholls’ The Bikeriders is another example of a film that uses slightly formalised interviews in the ‘present’ to access true stories from a character’s past (and again, I would argue, in this film it feels too much like an overly visible narrative device).
The ‘it really happened so it’s valid’ trope.
In LEE, for instance, there are scenes towards the start of the film in which Lee and her female friends dine / drink and socialise in the garden of their South of France villa topless. At the end of the film when we see a range of Lee’s real photos, we see that this was reality – there are photos of her female friends and her topless with their male friends. I suppose it’s there to dramatize her free-thinking, bohemian lack of conventionality. But it’s misjudged and distracting, adds nothing of value to the scene. And it seems to me it’s only justified by the argument that this is what they actually did.
Captions
Weirdly, often one of the most narratively satisfying things about some biopics are those end-of-film captions that tell us what happened next in the lives of these characters, what they maybe went on to achieve as a result of the events of the film. This isn’t a criticism, just an observation!
Biopic as memoir rather than fully-fledged biography
I think this is a helpful way of looking at how biopics should work.
This blog arose out of a conversation with my daughter Eliza – and here are some of her thoughts about BIOPICS –
The whole life
Most biopics are womb-to-tomb stories, yet very few people are interesting for their entire lives. Stretching out a person’s entire life into a neat narrative arc often results in an encyclopaedic, historically accurate, fact-by-fact account that rarely translates well into a memorable film. By attempting to honour every chapter of a life, the film can lack the vital spark of authorship and creative ownership. This is often the case when biopics are more concerned with historical reverence than cinematic vision.
The writer’s attitude to / relationship with their subject
Some biopics feel more like a form of ritualistic worship, especially when the subject is deceased. The treatment of the protagonists is respectful to the point of censorship. By shielding their subjects from flaws or controversy, filmmakers end up dulling what made their subjects so compelling in the first place. Biopics become sanitised accounts, afraid to show people in their authentic humanity. In the process, they distance the character from the audience.
Examples
A biopic that I think works is Pablo Larrain’s Spencer (PS – screenplay by Steven Knight). This film is a psychological tableau, rather than a biographical ticklist. By gifting the film the constraint of a time period of three days, rather than thirty years, Larrain delivers an intimate character study, rather than a sprawling historical document. The real life person, Princess Diana, is taken as a suggestion rather than a sticking point. Larrain plays with his character and her circumstances. There are elements of magical realism, and a blurred line between what is real and what’s happening in her head. A scene from the film which has stuck with me for years afterward is the dinner sequence. There is no dialogue in the entire four minutes. Just a cloying and clinical formality and an absolutely haunting score. The ghost of Anne Boleyn sits opposite her. She tugs hard at a thick pearl necklace that’s been placed round her neck until it falls into the pastel green soup that’s been served up. She takes a spoonful of soup and big thick pearl into her mouth and bites down. Finally feeling some relief as she eats every single pearl. It’s a disgusting and haunting vision, a way of showing rather than telling (in this case, showing the fictionalised Diana’s discorded eating and struggles with food), and it’s an obvious demonstration by Larrain that he is not scared of the story he is telling and, perhaps more importantly, he is not afraid of the character he is studying. There is a selfish ownership – it is his version of Diana – which I think is a vital aspect of filmmaking which some biopics fatally lack.
Thank you Eliza!
PS Example – Moneyball, written by Steven Zallian and Aaron Sorkin.
A biopic (about baseball general manager Billy Bene) that focuses on a single baseball season – with occasional, non-verbal flashbacks to his earlier life – to tell his story. This is the season that transformed his life and career and I suppose is as much about the titular ‘moneyball’ system as it is about Billy Bene. But the film wouldn’t have worked without this central human story – the story of the personal and professional risks he took to revive a flagging career. It has many of the hallmarks of ‘sports movie’ and is more of a genre combo – but it’s still a great example of a biopic that avoids the pitfalls and tells a specifically baseball story that still feels universally relatable.
I’d love to hear YOUR thoughts / responses about BIOPICS…please get in touch.
Finally a plug for the fantastic (I’m biased obviously but she is) Eliza –
ELIZA SHELLEY is a budding junior script editor / reader. Recently graduated from brand-new university, the London Interdisciplinary School, the first new institution in the UK since the 1960s to hold degree-awarding powers from its opening. She has worked at Binocular Productions as development intern and then executive assistant; development intern at Clerkenwell Pictures; runner on the Harry Sherriff / Laurence Tratalos feature film, Misper; and on short film Transaction; and has read scripts for Binocular and Urban Myth Films. She has done courses in script editing / script development at the NFTS and with the brilliant Maria Odufuye.
The next newsletter will be on Friday November 1st.
Happy Writing,
Phil
PHILIP SHELLEY
Twitter: @PhilipShelley1
Friday October 18th 2024
