The Screengrab : my left foot

Screengrab Salutes: The Top Biopics of All Time! (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:30:00 GMT

MALCOLM X (1992)

There was an Oscar ceremony one year where Denzel Washington and Spike Lee were the co-presenters of some category or tribute, and while I may be misremembering the whole thing, it seemed very much like the two of them were pissed, huddled together, leaning over the podium and glaring at the sea of rich white faces before them as they bit through their teleprompter lines in tones of obvious displeasure. While I’m shaky on the particulars, in my mind, I like to imagine the two of them were reacting to the fact that Lee’s masterful, sweeping adaptation of The Autobiography of Malcolm X only received one major Oscar nomination (for Best Actor)...and, adding insult to injury, Washington’s pitch-perfect performance in the title role somehow lost out to Al Pacino’s “hoo-hah” Scent of a Woman nonsense. I’m not always on Lee’s side when he cries racism (as in his recent dust-up with Clint Eastwood), but it’s hard to think of any other reason for such an obvious snub of the kind of period epic the Academy usually rewards (or at least frickin’ nominates). True, Malcolm X was and remains a controversial figure, but as cinema, Lee’s production is a stylistic masterpiece, capturing the shifting tides of his protagonist’s life as he evolves from Zoot-suited hustler to civil rights icon in a film as indelible and essential as Alex Haley’s canonical source material.

THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD (1996)

Vincent D'Onofrio probably has the best role of his career as Robert E. Howard, the pulp writer and mama's boy (with Ann Wedgeworth as his mama) who created Conan the Barbarian and other musclebound action icons, while spending his whole adult life marooned in the nowheresville of small-town Texas in the 1930s. A mannered Renee Zellweger plays the young budding schoolteacher and writer who makes a tentative stab at befriending him without ever knowing quite what to make of the tortured fellow. This small, affecting film is in some ways a subversive comment on the whole life-of-a-young-American-writer (or "I, John-Boy") genre, because it captures the quiet, rural life that movies so often depict as being an essential part of the back story of healthy, homegrown creative types, and then shows why anyone who had the imagination to be any kind of writer but found themselves physically trapped there would end up wanting to blow their brains out.

MY LEFT FOOT (1989)

Make no mistake: Jim Sheridan's biography of Christy Brown is a rich and scabrous work, full of fury at both the horror of being born into Irish poverty and a body that won't do what you want it to, and the power of Daniel Day-Lewis' performance as a romantic artist with cerebral palsy is in no way compromised or embarrassed by the fact that it won an Academy Award, as if the voters thought this was some Rain Man shit. Sure, for a lot of actors, a role like this would amount to a chance to be applauded and praised for how well they could shake. For Day-Lewis, mastering the physical tremors and folding his body into a pretzel just amounted to laying down the floorboards before he could really go to work.

SERPICO (1973)

When watching Serpico, it's easy to get distracted from the biopic factor. There is the classic man-against-the-machine plot line, the shots of vintage New York...then there is the sense that Al Pacino often seems to be playing Al Pacino, no matter who he is supposed to portray -- though you cannot deny it is interesting to watch him plumb the depths of his own murky psyche. But let's not get lost here: Officer Frank Serpico, was, and is, a real character -- slightly nutty as portrayed by a deliciously young and wounded-looking Pacino, and judging by Serpico's website (hey, go Google it!), quite possibly a few sandwiches short of a picnic in real life. He was of course, a young police officer who went to battle against corruption in the NYPD, for which he paid in health and sanity. Watching Serpico raises some questions: why couldn't Al Pacino be young and beautiful forever? Whatever happened to bringing down the system at all costs? Will people start sticking it to the Man again, now that the economy is in free fall? Will short dark cops start sporting beards and love beads? If American Gangster came out in 2007, does that mean we will have to wait another 34 years for another movie with a similar plot? Who knows...until then, enjoy Al Pacino in a beard.

32 SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLENN GOULD (1993)

Biopics are episodic practically by definition, since it's practically impossible to encompass an entire life without boiling that life down into vignettes. Francois Girard's film about concert pianist Glenn Gould (played by Colm Feore) is probably the most extreme example of this idea. Taking his cue from Bach's thirty-two Goldberg Variations (perhaps Gould's most famous recording), Girard recreates a series of incidents from Gould's life -- from his youth to his concert career, to his later experiments with recording and radio -- with almost nothing in the way of transitional material. In doing so, the film avoids many of the traps of standard-issue biopics, especially the rise-and-fall structure and easy psychoanalysis most filmmakers tend to impose onto the stories of historical figures. There are no subplots about Gould's domestic life, no crisis or obstacle for him to overcome, and scarcely a mention of his relationships or sex life. Girard replaces the convenient formula with a genuine curiosity about who Gould was, what made him tick, and why exactly he retired from public performance at the height of his popularity to devote himself solely to recordings, a moment that feels as offhand here as it allegedly was to Gould himself. What makes the film and its subject all the more fascinating is that Girard doesn't pretend to know the answers, and rather than trying to nail them down, he simply shows us key scenes from Gould's life and encourages us to figure the answers out for ourselves. 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould is the polar opposite of an Oscar-bait biopic, and is that rarest of cinematic creatures -- a completely accessible movie that encourages, and rewards, real thought and reflection. Could this be why it's currently out of print on R1 DVD?

Click Here For Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Five & Part Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Paul Clark

There Will Be Ham: Over the Top with Daniel Day-Lewis

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Now that Daniel Day-Lewis has been anointed the overwhelming front-runner for Best Actor honors on Sunday night, some members of the criterati have decided to rain on his parade before it even gets started. Leading the charge is Salon's Stephanie Zacharek, making the seemingly counterintuitive argument "Too Great to Be Good." Zacharek makes it clear that, while audiences, critics and Academy voters may have fallen for Day-Lewis's obsessed oilman, she feels the actor is peddling nothing but snake oil. "Day-Lewis doesn't so much give a performance as offer a character design, an all-American totem painstakingly whittled from a twisted piece of wood," she writes. "The tragedy of Day-Lewis' performance in There Will Be Blood is that it defies the naturalism that made him a great actor — and I use the word ‘great' unequivocally — in the first place, as if he'd decided that naturalism is boring, that it no longer presents a challenge for him."

The debate continues over at MSN Movies, with Jim Emerson coming down more or less on Zacharek's side. Day-Lewis's performance, he says, "consists of the application and accumulation of effects — strips of newspaper, gobs of flour paste, buckets of paint, and bits of tinfoil, carefully layered onto an inflated balloon to make a big fat piñata. Only somebody forgot to stuff it." Kathleen Murphy is having none of it, describing the actor's turn as "authentically terrifying, a radical evocation of an American Aguirre: The Wrath of God. The actor seems to be possessed by Daniel Plainview — as he clearly was by Christy Brown in My Left Foot, for whom he literally sacrificed all physical grace in order to fully inhabit a broken body. . . This takes courage, or a kind of madness, a willingness to act out on the grand scale."

For the record, put me down on Murphy's side of the argument; larger-than-life characters call for larger-than-life performances — Orson Welles wasn't particularly "naturalistic" in Citizen Kane, and there's no reason he should have been. To his credit, Emerson is not necessarily opposed to Big Acting or over-the-top performances, as he notes on his own Scanners blog. "Performances pitched at the balcony, or the moon, always take the risk of falling somewhere between ‘tour-de-force' and ‘trying way too hard,' virtuosity and showboating. And opinions may vary about where they come down." Clearly that's the case, but there's no need to fight about it. Let's all share a milkshake, shall we?

Take Five: The Betrayal of the Body

Peter Smith — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Julian Schnabel, who's proved to be a much more interesting film director than he was a painter, has caused quite a stir in France with his latest, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Opening in limited release this weekend, the film deals with a French fashion magazine editor who suffers a paralyzing stroke and is forced to communicate with the world — telling tales not only of his internal imprisonment, but also of his rich interior life — the only way he can: by blinking out the words with his left eyelid, the sole part of his body he can still control. The idea that the human body is as much a prison as a vehicle is as old as Shakespeare, and it's likewise yielded a number of fine films, particularly from directors who've had their own bodies betray them, or those of their loved ones. When the mind is still sharp but seems to exist solely as a captive of a body, without which it cannot survive, but to which it is frustratingly bound, some outstanding, if terribly depressing, dramatic situations can ensue. Here are five films dealing with the ways in which the mind can become a prisoner of the body — and the ways in which those minds seek escape.

JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN (1971)

For many decades, a number of prominent directors had sought permission to make a film of Dalton Trumbo's stunningly powerful anti-war novel. Trumbo (a longtime victim of Hollywood's anti-Communist blacklist) always refused, saying that only he could properly translate the novel — which deals with a WWI veteran who loses his arms, legs and face to an exploding shell and desperately seeks a way to communicate his rage at the futility of the loss to the world — to film. When he finally did, it was an odd effort, to say the least, but it featured many of the book's most essential themes and powerful scenes. (A remake, based on a recent stage adaptation, is currently in the works.)

THE FLY (1986)

David Cronenberg's films have a number of common threads, but if one attitude hovers above them all, it's the simultaneous attraction to and revulsion at the human body — its vitality as well as its decay. Although the theme is present in almost all of his movies, nowhere is it more purely realized than in his remake of The Fly, where scientist Seth Brundle's slow disintegration and dehumanization as he transforms into a monster is both subtly and explicitly compared to the progress of those suffering from deadly diseases like cancer and AIDS. In a number of the movie's most telling and memorable pieces of dialogue, the director's fascination with the body's potential and the horror at its easy disintegration are obvious.

MY LEFT FOOT (1989)

Christy Brown's childhood could have — should have — been a brief, sad nightmare. Born with crippling cerebral palsy, he was barely expected to live, let alone thrive. But his fiercely determined mother refused to believe that there wasn't a lively mind inside that shattered body, and kept at the young Irishman to grow and to think, until he eventually learned to read, to write, and to paint with the left foot of the title, his only working limb. Borne to lofty heights largely on the strength of a terrific performance as Brown by Daniel Day-Lewis, My Left Foot was the directorial debut of Jim Sheridan, who went on to make other well-received, Oscar-nominated films such as The Field, In the Name of the Father and In America before somehow landing at the helm of 50 Cent's vanity project, Get Rich or Die Tryin', after which he presumably died of shame.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1991)

Master documentarian Errol Morris wisely assumed that audiences wouldn't be entirely enthralled by a straightforward discussion of the heavy-duty astrophysics contained in scientist Stephen Hawking's book of the same name. So he wisely chose to focus as much on Hawking himself as on his theories; Hawking is an endlessly compelling figure; despite having developed Lou Gehrig's disease in his early twenties, which has confined him to a wheelchair and made him incapable of speech or all but the tiniest movements, he is widely considered a scientific genius on the level of Albert Einstein. Morris presents some of Hawking's theories and, like the book that gives his film its name, attempts to make them accessible to the causal viewer, but likewise presents the enigma of the man who made them and asks us to consider the power of a the mind that occupies that nearly useless body.

FRIDA (2002)

Julie Taymor's biopic of the notorious Mexican painter Frida Kahlo is plagued with problems — spotty performances, a suspect script and more hoary clichés than you can shake a paintbrush at. But it's visually inventive, well-framed, and as good a cinematic look as we're likely ever going to get at the singular Ms. Kahlo. The brilliant, temperamental Frida was involved, at a young age, in a horrific accident that left her scarred for life and in constant pain, and while she became a celebrity, a heroine, and a towering figure in the arts of her homeland, she was never able to escape the wounds, both physical and psychic, left to her by the trauma.

— Leonard Pierce