Today I decided to go to a movie. Although I haven’t seen The Aviator, I eschewed it in favour of a charming, beautiful French film, A Very Long Engagement. I realized, also, that despite my voracious movie watching, I also hadn’t seen Ray, Finding Neverland, Kinsey or Beyond the Sea. I saw Alexander, mind you, but it was profoundly awful. So too was Delovely. Does The Motorcycle Diaries count as a biopic? Not really, it’s more of a road movie. Regardless, I’ve soured on the biopic.
Why? I think it’s their predictability. Inevitably, we get a standard set of scenes: the big break, the discovery montage, the struggle with addiction and/or insanity, the supportive and/or departing spouse, etc. I enjoy most the films that surprise me (as Jean-Pierre Jeunet, director of A Very Long Engagement, does well). Biopics rarely surprise me. In part, it’s because I usually know something about the subject.
I know there have been great biopics, and I’ve enjoyed them. Recently, though, I’ve tired of the forumula. I just checked a top-twenty list of my favourite films I made a couple of years ago (and it’s still more or less accurate). There’s only one biopic on it, and that’s the exceptional (and frequently surprising) Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould.
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Funnily enough, the Globe and Mail review of Kevin Spacey’s new Bobby Darin biopic made a very similar point. It complained that all biopics seem to have a rise, fall, redemption story arc, whether it fits the life in question or not. Not, in the case of Darin.
I find that the biopic usually leads me to the library. It seems to give me a little bit of a crash course about the life of a famous person, which usually leads to me reading some biographies and history about them because I want to find out what is real and what was fictionalized.
Some biopics are also worth seeing because of the performances in them- such as Ben Kingsley in Gandhi.
I’ve seen Kinsey and Finding Neverland, and I would recommend them both. I’d say Kinsey follows the formula of the biopic more closely than Neverland.
I really liked A Very Long Engagement too.