Biopic of the Litter
-Or-
And On the Seventh Day, God Rolled Credits
Finally saw The Queen the other day. I'm sorry I put it off. Of all the Best Picture nominees this year, it's the one that really moves.
The conventional biopic seems to me to be built on multiple episodes leading up to the hero's breaking point, followed by their ultimate redemption. See The Aviator, or Ray. The problem with that structure? First of all, it makes the films feel interminably slow. We simply aren't being guided toward an answer to a bigger question. The question is often just "Where will this end?" (or in my case, "Is this ever going to end?").
The Queen is so simple. It pits Elizabeth II against the newly-elected Tony Blair in the days following Princess Di's death. The big question being, will Elizabeth cave to the pressure to show public grief for this massively popular woman who was no longer part of the family?
The dramatic question being so simple creates two immediate benefits: first, this question has a limited shelf life. The movie takes place over six days. We know our answer can only be so far down the road. We know we're not, for instance, going to have to watch Elizabeth react to her mum's death, or Charles's engagement to Camilla, or Harry stupidly wearing that Nazi costume to a Halloween party. Instead, the movie propels itself toward its ending (the "answer") like a guided missile.
The second benefit? By having a very simple plot structure, there's lots of room for character. The movie tells the story of a woman through the story of this particular dilemma.
Why the hell is this such a rare choice for a biopic?
And On the Seventh Day, God Rolled Credits
Finally saw The Queen the other day. I'm sorry I put it off. Of all the Best Picture nominees this year, it's the one that really moves.
The conventional biopic seems to me to be built on multiple episodes leading up to the hero's breaking point, followed by their ultimate redemption. See The Aviator, or Ray. The problem with that structure? First of all, it makes the films feel interminably slow. We simply aren't being guided toward an answer to a bigger question. The question is often just "Where will this end?" (or in my case, "Is this ever going to end?").
The Queen is so simple. It pits Elizabeth II against the newly-elected Tony Blair in the days following Princess Di's death. The big question being, will Elizabeth cave to the pressure to show public grief for this massively popular woman who was no longer part of the family?
The dramatic question being so simple creates two immediate benefits: first, this question has a limited shelf life. The movie takes place over six days. We know our answer can only be so far down the road. We know we're not, for instance, going to have to watch Elizabeth react to her mum's death, or Charles's engagement to Camilla, or Harry stupidly wearing that Nazi costume to a Halloween party. Instead, the movie propels itself toward its ending (the "answer") like a guided missile.
The second benefit? By having a very simple plot structure, there's lots of room for character. The movie tells the story of a woman through the story of this particular dilemma.
Why the hell is this such a rare choice for a biopic?
posted by Jennica at 9:39 a.m.
4 Comments:
I think the trap of the biopic is often the mistake made that a life=a story. There are those great characters from history (or in this case the present) whose lives are filled with interesting details, events, and actions and the impulse is often to try and cram as much of them as possible into the story. But the biopic is still ultimately just that: a story. And it's often best when the story is examining a key question or idea. Although it's without a doubt Howard Hughes had an interesting life, I have no idea what the Aviator was actually about. Walk the Line was another sort of rambling mess of a bunch of pivitol moments going nowhere. And the worst part of that film was that the film makers seemed to reduce all of Johnny Cash's life to a table saw accident, took more than two hours to do it, and still managed to avoid having the film being about anything. When the story is based on an actual person the risk seems to be feeling like you have to do that person "justice", which often means cramming in all the important moments that made them famous. Instead I just want them to do the story justice.
[Sigh.]
Like you're reading my MIND, anonymous.
All I'm saying is: Jars of urine.
I loved The Queen and I have to say that immediately after I saw it, I was perplexed as to what exactly made it so good.
One thing I thought was that I hadn't seen a movie in a long time where I was compelled to watch the actors' faces so closely. There was so much subtext in each scene, it was was fascinating to watch the hidden agendas and motivations play out.
It seems in biopics in general, the actors tend to play the situations, rather than the subtext, giving an detached, almost caricature feel to everything.
Incidentally, we watched a doc last night about the painter Rolf Harris painting the Queen's portrait. The Queen herself was in a good deal of it, and John said, "I keep having to remind myself that that's not Helen Mirren."
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