A revered leader of nonviolent civil disobedience. An Olympic wrestler, his brother and an eccentric, ultra-wealthy patron. A World War II codebreaker with an awkward manner and a secret. A genius of space-time physics bound by his betraying body.
Martin Luther King Jr., Mark Schultz, Alan Turing and Stephen Hawking are among the reality-based characters appearing on movie screens currently.
And although they have been depicted as fascinatingly flawed or achingly human, as beset with doubt yet tempered by the courage their moment demands — in other words, compelling movie protagonists — they have elicited responses that have called into question the veracity of the films they appear in. In December, Mark Schultz began waging a mildly unhinged ” director Bennett Miller.
“Everything I’ve ever said positive about the movie I take back. I hate it. i hate it. i hate it. I hate it. i hate it. i hate it. I hate it,” he tweeted, after reviews of the movie focused on the homoerotic tension in his relationship to coach and patron John du Pont, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
This month’s controversy concerns Ava DuVernay’s civil rights drama, “Selma.” Last week, The New York Times ran a piece on its front page titled “Depiction of Lyndon B. Johnson Raises Hackles.” Much of the dispute concerns the accuracy of the prickly interactions between King and President Johnson prior to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
And though the pedigree of the detractors is impressive, the criticisms strike a familiar chord. That never happened. That character didn’t even exist. That meeting didn’t take place, at least not that way. He was more comfortable with his sexuality than the movie asserts. And so it goes.
When it comes to art, it seems, there is truth and there are facts. And while I won’t go so far as to say “never the twain shall meet,’ ” they often have a complicated relationship on the big screen.
At no time in the movie calendar is this so true as awards season. Now’s the time when “serious” films taking their cues from actual people and events vie for moviedom’s biggest prizes — and also get the once-over twice for dramatizing real life.
Mining history
Tonight, four of the five films competing for the Golden Globe for best motion picture drama are based on real events: “Foxcatcher,” “The Imitation Game,” “Selma” and “The Theory of Everything.” (And let’s not forget “Pride.” The British indie comedy about a collective of gay activists who donated money to wary striking coal miners in the mid-1980s has a berth in the best musical or comedy category.)
Come early morning Thursday, a few of these are sure to become best-picture contenders when the nominees for the Academy Awards are announced. And because the Oscars contest has many as 10 slots available for best-picture nominees, a couple more movies could nudge their way into the race: “American Sniper,” Clint Eastwood’s film about Navy SEAL Chris Kyle; and, less likely, Angelina Jolie’s “Unbroken,” about Olympic runner and WWII prisoner of war Louis Zamperini. (ABC will broadcast the Oscars live Feb. 22.)
Stay tuned for next week’s stir about the Kyle flick. Former Minnesota Gov. and Navy SEAL Jesse Ventura’s is back in the news as the Eastwood film makes its way into multiplexes.
As movies take the biopic route more and more, ruminations about how close they hew to the facts of subject and era have become part of the annual awards rite, too.
Often the truth-fiction divide has been used to tarnish a contender’s chances for the Oscar. was the headline from savvy industry site deadline.com.
For more than a decade, the movie biz has binged on the award-season dish of the real and the fabricated. In 2000, front-runner for best actor Denzel Washington lost ground as character Rubin “Hurricane” Carter was picked apart. The winner that year: Russell Crowe for his turn as Maximus in “Gladiator.” The next year, Crowe’s seeming lock on Oscar about Nobel Prize winner John Nash’s anti-Semitism. That year’s winner: Denzel Washington for his turn as Detective Alonzo Harris in “Training Day.”
Yes, like political campaigns, things can get nasty in Hollywood.
Last week, Warner Bros. apologized to Sony Pictures Classics and canned an award consultant who had set up a fake Twitter account in order to snipe at Bennett Miller’s “Foxcatcher.”
But this isn’t new or news. Exactly. After all, Hollywood will repeat this particular madness. These folks love a sequel. But what about the rest of us?
Transgender stand-in
Last spring, an audience member at an Aspen Shortsfest panel of film and TV writers — among them, Oscar nominee Craig Borten who penned “Dallas Buyers Club — was genuinely crestfallen upon learning that Rayon (Jared Leto) was an invention.
It’s so nice to imagine that nervy, wounded character softening and challenging the bigoted Ron Woodruff. Borten and co-writer Melisa Wallack did, after all. The transgender character was created as a stand-in for others who had been on the frontlines of the battle against HIV/AIDS, but Rayon didn’t exist. I felt the audience member’s pain, but I never felt rooked by a movie that was in many ways a parable about a tarnished hero and his transformation.
Don’t get me wrong: I am not a fan of mendacity. There’s far too much at play these days.
While the vetting of political ads is an exhausting but increasingly crucial civic service, I’m not sure the same can be said of the scrutiny these movies get.
Granted, the bigger the subject — presidents, battlefield exploits — the more filmmakers should take care not to muddy the waters more than they already are.
Yet historians are hardly in agreement about public figures. The “Selma” controversy began with a piece by Mark K. Updegrove, director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum. And LBJ aide Joseph A. Califano Jr., has been one of the film’s most vociferous critics. This doesn’t discount their complaints but they do have a stake in Johnson’s legacy.
Their concerns also speak to a worry, not unfounded, that too many of us are fine with learning about the past solely from popular culture. What smart person wouldn’t be freaked that people are shifting away from being well-read, diligent skeptics to lapping up lessons from the big screen?
Movies about historical figures give historians a nice opportunity to speak to the presumably larger audience that major motion pictures — especially those with awards possibilities — afford them. Some of the quibbling strikes me as professional jealousy and competition. You tread on my turf, beware!
When it comes to the past, these films can only be starting points, portals. Although the central events in “Selma” took place in 1965, the film had me reaching for “Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963,” volume 1 of Taylor Branch’s exquisite civil rights account.
Illusion of reality
While there are always exceptions, theater tends not to be bedeviled by the same scrutiny, even when it portrays real people’s lives or historical events.
Why might this be?
Theater begins with the advantage of a kind of wonderful, oddly persuasive artifice. Film reels us in with the visual illusion of reality, with pictures. And, yes, filmmakers like to exploit the real when it suits them and discount it when its rhythms are perhaps inconvenient. But that is in some way the artist’s prerogative.
Writing nearly two millennia before movies began confusing us about the real and the depicted, Marcus Aurelius stated, “Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.” That seems a little radical but also utterly contemporary.
It took the very clever David O. Russell to give a much-needed elbow to the “based on” come-on.
“Some of This Actually Happened” was the director’s cheeky salvo to 2013’s “American Hustle,” about a con man, his lady love and the 1970s Abscam sting.
Sure, it was a dodge, a claim to the creative space. It was also refreshing.
Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567, lkennedy@denverpost.com or twitter.com/bylisakennedy
