January 2006

Talking About the Movies: Biopics and Bio-Pieces

with Frank Beaver

Good Night and Good Luck

The celebrity biopic seems to have found a regular place in the annual fall-winter rundown to Oscar. Last year the big entry was Ray, a powerful rendering of the life and music of singer Ray Charles. This year it’s the story of the emergence and later troubled career of singer Johnny Cash in a film titled after one of his songs, Walk the Line.

Both of these biopics pay homage to the classic Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), a screen treatment of the life of country-western singer Loretta Lynn. In significant ways the celebrity biopic is establishing its own sub-genre within a long-standing and popular staple of American filmmaking, the biopic.

During the Depression years, when backstage musicals and films with populist themes were providing upbeat, idealistic screen entertainment, so too was the biopic. The studios, with Warner Bros. leading the way, developed stories about famous historical figures.

Screen protagonists of the 1930s included, among many others, Alexander Hamilton, Florenz Ziegfeld, Louis Pasteur, Emile Zola, Alexander Graham Bell, Benito Juarez and Abraham Lincoln. The scripts of the historical biopics emphasized a variety of character qualities: commitment, persistence, courage and moral purpose—ingredients that projected the protagonists as admirable role models. It was a type of film that was well-suited to the times.

The celebrity biopic follows another kind of dramatic path—one that incorporates large doses of character psychology; this has been particularly so as the legendary-singer biopic has evolved over the past 25 years. In Coal Miner’s Daughter, an entertainment legend rises from humble roots to great acclaim and public adoration, only to have insecurities fester until they threaten both personal life and a hard-won professional career.

Pills and an eventual nervous breakdown constituted the crisis arc in the Loretta Lynn biopic. In Ray and Walk the Line the scenarios travel similar paths but incorporate flashbacks to identify the sources of the protagonists’ inner demons, placing the motivation for adult vulnerability in childhood trauma and familial angst. Drugs, alcohol and pills are used to narcotize the lasting pain, and a dark, compulsive character emerges on the screen. The ultimate dramatic issue is that of survival.

When the inevitable comeback occurs, as it does in each of these films, the effect is not unlike the inspirational historical biopics of the 1930s. And for that matter, not unlike the upbeat backstage musicals of the same period, in which performers had to overcome great odds before they could mount their triumphant productions.

The fact that Walk the Line’s plot parallels that of Ray should not lessen our appreciation of the more recent film. Both use motivational flashbacks, but they have different consequences. In Ray, flashbacks to Ray Charles’s brother’s death by drowning (an event he witnessed before his blindness) reoccur periodically as brief hallucinations—projecting one haunting image as a formative moment in the protagonist’s complex life. In Walk the Line (whose producer, Alan Blomquist ('76), is a Michigan alum and one of my former students), the death of a brother appears in a lengthy opening flashback and sets in motion a father-son relationship that plagues Johnny Cash throughout his life (and the film), suggesting a source of the insecurities that nearly ruined him. This opening flashback also helps reveal the simple life from which Cash emerged, and which shaped his musical legacy as a Man (in Black) of the People.

The performances by Joaquin Phoenix as Cash and Reese Witherspoon as June Carter Cash are impressively accurate in their interpretations of the two performers as they looked and acted and sounded in the 1950s and ’60s. Cash’s awkward stage mannerisms (a strong lean to the left when performing) and Carter-Cash’s chatty silliness between numbers uncannily match the descriptions we have of the duo in their touring years together before their 1968 marriage. And I enjoyed the fact that Phoenix and Witherspoon did their own singing, and that they did so convincingly.

Along with the biopic this Oscar season, there have been some remarkable films that for lack of a better term I will call bio-pieces. These are films based on famous people, but whose dramatic focus deals with a slice of the characters’ lives. Two of these films were among the best pictures of 2005: Good Night and Good Luck and Capote.

Good Night and Good Luck, directed by George Clooney, returns to the 1950s and the confrontation between Edward R. Murrow and his staff at CBS-TV and Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Like the historical biopic, it’s a film about courage, diligence and moral purpose—in this case getting the truth out to the American people about an insidious force within the political landscape. Composed in a tightly observed style reminiscent of a chamber play and rendered in expressive imagery lifted from a black and white palette, Good Night and Good Luck tells an historically important story that holds clear implications for current political issues and debate.

Capote excerpts a period in Truman Capote’s life, beginning in 1959 when the writer became involved with two men sentenced to death for the brutal murders of a Kansas farm family and ending with the publication of In Cold Blood, a docu-novel account of the crime and its perpetrators.

To write the book Capote developed a close relationship with the men as they awaited their fate on death row. The film is a nuanced character study of the dissonance that occurred as Capote came to know and, seemingly, to care deeply for one of the two men, followed by the guilt that began to surface with the realization that his story would only find its proper ending when the two had been executed.

In Cold Blood made Capote rich and famous, but the film implies that the contradictions involved in writing the book served to hasten the writer’s self-destructive demise. This is a dark, pessimistic morality tale, but one that glows with Philip Seymour Hoffman’s brilliant and Oscar-leading characterization of Capote.   

Good Night and Good Luck and Capote are provocative bio-pieces with appeal for discriminating filmgoers; they also reveal that impressive (and successful) films can still be made with modest budgets: Good Night and Good Luck had a production budget of a mere $7,000,000. There is a lesson in that fact, especially in this time of box-office crisis for American filmmaking and the failure of so many big-budget Hollywood films.  

Film historian and critic Frank Beaver is professor of film and video studies and professor of communication.