{"id":52939,"date":"2013-05-23T15:11:37","date_gmt":"2013-05-23T19:11:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=52939"},"modified":"2013-05-23T16:44:33","modified_gmt":"2013-05-23T20:44:33","slug":"what-we-wish-we-were-on-biopic-mania","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/05\/23\/what-we-wish-we-were-on-biopic-mania\/","title":{"rendered":"What We Wish We Were: On Biopic-Mania"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Liberacelarge\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Sometimes there are things you didn\u2019t know you wanted to see.<\/p>\n

Like Michael Douglas, spangled and rouged, arms out in a white ostrich-trimmed cape, prancing sideways across a Vegas stage. This is barely two seconds of the trailer for Steven Soderbergh\u2019s Behind the Candelabra<\/i>, about the relationship between Liberace and his younger lover, Scott Thorson, but those are two seconds I want to see over and over.<\/p>\n

Usually I get cranky and snide about biopics. The last one I saw was Hitchcock<\/i>. I went to have my prejudices against the genre affirmed, and they were. I kept watching Anthony Hopkins in his fat suit and thinking about his makeup, the boom just outside the frame, the camera rolling back on its track, the contrivance of the whole thing\u2014and not in some provocative, Brechtian sense. I left full of scorn for the labored verisimilitude and regurgitated history\u2014a petty way to go to the movies, but kind of satisfying, too, in the way that being petty can be.<\/p>\n

Maybe it\u2019s a good film if you weren\u2019t aware Alfred Hitchcock had a thing for so-called icy blonds and that he got creepily obsessive when it came to his leading ladies. And if that\u2019s not clear from watching Hopkins\/Hitchcock skulk around dressing rooms, Jessica Biel\/Vera Miles explains it to Scarlett Johansson\/Janet Leigh and us in a scene that feels more like a DVD featurette about the \u201cmaking of\u201d than dialogue between two people. <\/p>\n

\"Hitchcock\"<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n

According to Clement Greenberg<\/a>, \u201ckitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas,\u201d which you could easily say of the biopic, a genre stuffed with formula. There\u2019s the childhood trauma, in which the character suffers a tragic incident or loss that confers gravitas and a readymade psychic wound to explain whatever ambition and abuse will follow. There\u2019s usually early success, a fall from grace, a period of abjection, but eventually self-reckoning and final redemption.<\/p>\n

And if, as Sanford Meisner said, the goal of acting is to live truthfully under imaginary circumstances, in the biopic it so often feels like actors are living imaginatively under truthful\u2014or true-ish\u2014circumstances. They become not so much characters but mouthpieces with canned histories, familiar tics and accents. Acting as karaoke.<\/p>\n

But I should be clear not to malign the art of karaoke. I\u2019ve seen so-called regular people\u2014the untrained, nonprofessional, nonfamous\u2014approach something like the ecstatic in those unrehearsed moments while the lyrics change color on TV screens. In the biopic, not so much.<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n

Too often the films end up feeling like elaborate sessions of playing dollhouse. Which can be a thing of great wonder<\/a>\u00a0if the film is about Karen Carpenter and the director is Todd Haynes and the talent is actual Barbie dolls.<\/p>\n

Even if Michael Douglas fails at playing Liberace, according to Susan Sontag, the film\u2019s value as camp will skyrocket. I won\u2019t be sorry. I\u2019ve got plenty of shares of that stock. But I do hope Michael Douglas\u2019s performance is actually good. I hope he imbues the Vegas showqueen with humanity and complexity and that I am not only entertained but also moved.<\/p>\n

That said, I have no desire to see Douglas \u201cdisappear\u201d into the role of the ermined pianist because there is a subgenre of the biopic that I love unreservedly and I\u2019m hoping that Behind the Candelabra<\/i> will take it to new extremes.<\/p>\n

\"Palatial;Kitsch\"<\/center><\/p>\n

I\u2019m thinking of Mommie Dearest<\/i> as an example, in that I never stop seeing Faye Dunaway and Joan Crawford, whether she\u2014or rather, they\u2014are chopping down rose bushes or commandeering the Pepsi board room. I\u2019m thinking of movies in which you see both actor and subject at the same time: a bioptic.<\/p>\n

To fall within this particular category, both figures must inhabit significant and discrete real estate in the cultural imagination. Jimmy Stewart as Charles Lindbergh in The Spirit of St. Louis<\/i> might fit, but then Lindbergh\u2019s public persona hasn\u2019t sustained quite the vividness that, say, Margaret Thatcher\u2019s has. So Meryl Streep as the Iron Lady satisfies the conditions of the bioptic, but to my thinking Streep as Karen Silkwood does not because the whistle blower didn\u2019t really figure in popular consciousness until after her death, and then even more so after Streep\u2019s portrayal of her. Streep as Lindy Chamberlain (\u201cDingo ate my baby!\u201d) doesn\u2019t fit, but Streep as Julia Child does.<\/p>\n

On some level you could say this is just famous people playing famous people, but Anthony Hopkins is famous and Alfred Hitchcock is famous and that pairing doesn\u2019t create the kind of double exposure I\u2019m looking for. Hopkins isn\u2019t famous in a weird enough way. He\u2019s famous for being a good actor but not necessarily for his off-screen persona.<\/p>\n

So given this logic, Lindsay Lohan as Liz Taylor\u2014if a bit overdetermined\u2014fits the bill. James Franco as James Dean didn\u2019t count when that TV biopic came out in 2001, since it was several years before Franco would hit fameballdom. But Franco\u2019s interpretation of Riff Raff<\/a> in Spring Breakers<\/i> does, and certainly Riff Raff as Franco<\/a> in One Life to Live<\/i>\u00a0counts\u2014a bioptic and pop-culture ouroboros.<\/p>\n

Lee Daniels\u2019s The Butler<\/i> is scheduled to come out in August, which means, among the many inspired casting choices (John Cusack as Nixon, Liev Schreiber as LBJ, Robin Williams as Eisenhower), that Jane Fonda will play Nancy Reagan. And so we enter a funhouse of leg warmers, astrologers, and celebrity association. Hanoi Jane is the goddaughter of Alla Nazimova. Tom Joad\u2019s daughter is Ronald Reagan\u2019s \u201cMommy.\u201d<\/p>\n

At IMDb, Mike Newell\u2019s Reykjavik<\/a><\/i>, about the 1986 summit, is listed in preproduction, with Gorbachev played by Christopher Waltz and Ronald Reagan by Michael Douglas.<\/p>\n

\"QueenElizabeth\"<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n

In Harmony Korine\u2019s Mister Lonely<\/i>, Diego Luna is a Michael Jackson impersonator in Paris where it\u2019s too hot and he\u2019s very much alone. But then he meets Samantha Morton, a Marilyn Monroe impersonator, and decides to join her at a commune in Scotland where she lives with other celebrity impersonators, including her lover, a Charlie Chaplin impersonator played by an aggressive, feral Denis Lavant. She describes it as a special place, \u201cwhere everyone is famous.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mister Lonely<\/i> wears its absurdity lightly. James Dean herds sheep. Shirley Temple feeds the chickens. This is a movie that completely bypasses the kitschy, clunky apparatus of the biopic and looks directly at the impulse to impersonate. There are no heavy-handed explanations for anyone\u2019s wounds or desires\u2014it\u2019s a given that everybody has them. Whatever backstories or preprocessed psychology there may be is summed up in a toast the pope impersonator gives the group: \u201cEveryone in this room is not like everybody else, but the good thing is we have found one another and we have become what we wish we were.\u201d Scenes that might have otherwise remained tongue-in-check set pieces\u2014Charlie Chaplin trounces Michael Jackson at ping-pong\u2014are often poignant, sometimes haunting, with the film effortlessly gliding back and forth between joy and sorrow.<\/p>\n

On the night before the impersonators put on a show for the local village, the Queen smokes what may be a postcoital cigarette while in bed with the Pope. These two impersonators are played, respectively, by Anita Pallenberg and James Fox, who last shared the screen when they starred, with Mick Jagger, in Donald Cammell and Nicholas Roeg\u2019s Performance <\/i>from 1970. The movie, about a gangster in hiding and a rock star who has \u201clost his demon,\u201d goes down a cosmic rabbit hole of sex and drugs, exploding ideas about masculinity, stardom, and the possibilities for impersonation.<\/p>\n

\"Roeg\"<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n

Michael Douglas lifts his cape\u2014a strange, glittering bird in full flounce. Thank God for Liberace, I think. And my gratitude isn\u2019t just for the scale of the man\u2019s flamboyance\u2014though, yes, for that\u2014but mostly because I\u2019m seeing Gordon Gekko without the French cuffs. When I see Michael Douglas\u2019s gleaming rictus smile and the slight dip of his head\u2014almost a curtsy\u2014all those aggrieved, thin-lipped straight men from the eighties topple away. I know some of those films, like Basic Instinct<\/i>, Disclosure<\/i>, and Falling Down<\/i>, are from the nineties, but they feel like they were made in an eighties hangover, laced with rage that the Reagan era of entitlement wasn\u2019t sticking. And why are those the ones that always come to mind, and not Romancing the Stone<\/i> or The War of the Roses<\/i>? A question for another day.<\/p>\n

I watch the fey sidle of Michael Douglas\u2019s hips and I see the scratchy-voiced cop from The Streets of San Francisco <\/i>and the paterfamilias from Traffic<\/i> swan across the stage to a mirrored piano. A swish of the cape. The handsome young chauffeur settles the showqueen\u2019s train. Michael Douglas arranges himself at the bench, bejeweled fingers poised above the keys, and I am grateful.<\/p>\n

You can see <\/i>Behind the Candelabra Sunday night on HBO, and <\/i>Performance<\/a>, presented by Gregg Bordowitz, on June 3 at the IFC Center as part of the series Queer Art Film<\/a>. <\/i><\/p>\n

Liz Brown<\/a> is a writer in Brooklyn.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometimes there are things you didn\u2019t know you wanted to see. Like Michael Douglas, spangled and rouged, arms out in a white ostrich-trimmed cape, prancing sideways across a Vegas stage. This is barely two seconds of the trailer for Steven Soderbergh\u2019s Behind the Candelabra, about the relationship between Liberace and his younger lover, Scott Thorson, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1186],"tags":[10944,10939,4604,79,10850,8777,539,10404,10938,10937,4829,10943,10941,10942,5616,501,10940],"class_list":["post-52939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-film","tag-anthony-hopkins","tag-biopics","tag-faye-dunaway","tag-film","tag-harmony-korine","tag-hitchcock","tag-james-franco","tag-karen-carpenter","tag-kitsch","tag-liberace","tag-matt-damon","tag-michael-douglas","tag-mommie-dearest","tag-riff-raff","tag-sanford-meisner","tag-susan-sontag","tag-todd-haynes"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat We Wish We Were: On Biopic-Mania by Liz Brown<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"May 23, 2013 \u2013 Sometimes there are things you didn\u2019t know you wanted to see. 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