Sunday Review: A new trend in films?

“Factually” “based”

By Jonathan Price

I go to see many films, as many as I can and still have a life and still be human. My goal is two films a week. That would be 104 films a year, more if you add the few that are relegated to first viewing via video or streaming. Serious film reviewers often see 200 to 400 films a year. But it has seemed to me lately that more and more films are “factually” “based” – that is, their source or origin or impetus is a biography or history. This would include films this year such as Selma, which is both biography and history; or The Imitation Game or Big Eyes or The Theory of Everything (reviewed on January 4) or American Sniper. I know many films begin with some kind of subtitle or suggestion or claim, “based on a true story,” and that this has some resonance and power and draw for a potential audience.

    Yet I think of films as an artistic medium rendering a kind of aesthetic or inventive response to events of human existence, where the “based on” is far more important than the “true story” part. It took a long time for public and colleges and intelligentsia to accept the claim that film was an art form. Perhaps the transformative era for me occurred when I was in college (lo, some 52 years ago), when there were no film departments nor film majors nor film schools, but simply film societies: it was under the auspices of these in their various configurations that I became acquainted with the French New Wave in films such as Hiroshima Mon Amour or Shoot the Piano Player and where I came to see the films of Chaplin and, later, Keaton as not merely funny and entertaining but thoughtful and perceptive and yes, art. It was under such influence, and others, that the American era of great filmmaking and great directors and film schools began to be built, and led to such films as Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather, American Graffiti, M*A*S*H, and many others. You might note that among all these films, almost randomly listed, only Bonnie and Clyde might be said to be factually or historically based, though it is far from accurate or historical in its intention or result.
    Of course, reality checking (against databases) is helpful and often more accurate or fair than memory. For example this year’s academy award nominees (not necessarily the best, or certainly the most representative films) list nine entrees, and three are what might be called fiction films: Whiplash, Boyhood, and Birdman. In 2013, six of the nine were fiction films, in 2011 five were fiction films; in 2004, when there were only five nominees, four; in 1994, three were fiction films; in 1974, one of which was American Graffiti, all five. So, apparently there has been this gradually increasing movement away from films created, at least in a sense, out of pure imagination. However, as Joyce suggests, only God creates out of nothing.

    One can try, at least for a little while (a few paragraphs), to sympathize with movie makers. There’s this constant demand for films, and this is what they do, and good scripts are so hard to come by, and the average studio-based film is so expensive to make: this is why films gravitate toward “proven trends,” often to their own default – why there are so many avatars of Rocky; why there are a number of remakes of The Great Gatsby, none of them at all great; why Titanic gets remade every generation despite the fact that there is basically no plot and we all know how it ends; why “bankable” stars are enlisted to create a salable property. And why a script that comes out of headlines or biography or a known commodity, like “history,” has its appeal. It suggests power and authenticity, or maybe it has the appeal of reality TV, in that it is actually taken from life. And the outlines and key events of the screenplay are thus presumably already written. But, like all generalizations of half-baked theories, this is grossly distorted and misleading thinking – since, for example, it is no easy task to distill the events of Stephen Hawking’s epic, periodically painful and compelling romantic life and theories into a 120-minute film; it is not easy to decide what to include about the background of Martin Luther King’s epic battles against Southern (and national) bigotry to achieve the results that are foregrounded in Selma; it is not easy to synthesize or summarize the events of Chris Kyle’s life from 5 to 39 to make American Sniper. To its credit, American Sniper is a far more inclusive and challenging film, in dealing with Kyle’s changing mindset and absences from home, than the title would imply: it’s not just about sitting camouflaged on a rooftop with a spotter and a radio connection picking out particular targets on a high-range rifle.

    Of course, mentioning Rocky remakes and Great Gatsby and Titanic reminds us that a fictional basis is no guarantee of a fundamentally distinguished film. I suppose we could also note in the context of this discussion that Shakespeare, clearly a brand name in drama and excellence, created a number of plays with pre-made plots based in history, such as Richard III, Henry IV, and so forth. One might add that though Shakespeare may have taken some plots from Plutarch’s lives or contemporary British chronicles, he didn’t seem much constrained by facts, and he employed great imaginative skill in creating interior characters and dialogue for some supposedly known figures of history. Nevertheless his King Lear or Hamlet, perhaps mythically based on some dim histories, are far greater plays and characters. I hope it’s also clear that I have great respect for the achievements of many of this year’s films, especially in terms of acting and script.
    Yet the tendency to make increasingly more films based “on a true story” seems problematic and unfortunate to me, a kind of “easy way out.” Find a compelling pre-made packet, such as a recent memoir with some kind of cinematic elements, select the key parts, then film it. Don’t try to imagine what a compelling or representative character might have done, don’t fit background, context, imagery to an imagined plot. The plot is premade in history, just eliminate the confusing elements. Okay. This is a simplistic and superficial critique of the tendency. But I still find great fiction far more compelling than nonfiction.

Then there is the other problem, somewhat artificial, that this tendency creates. The near-obvious, near-inevitable critical question: is the film true to…the true story? Perhaps this is as much, for me at least, a red herring as the critique of films derived from novels: is it true to the book? I would argue that some of the best films based on “material from another medium” such as The Godfather or Shoot the Piano Player or Petulia are intriguing or powerful because of how they alter the material and go far beyond it.
    Films based on key historical events, such as Selma, inevitably raise similar questions: because perhaps they distort history, as if history were such a fixed essence, rather than constantly being reevaluated and rewritten every year – consider the number of books just this last year, on the hundredth anniversary of its beginning – of World War I. Selma has yielded criticism based on its portrait of President Lyndon Johnson, seen in the film as a partial foil for Martin Luther King, its hero. Johnson emerges as reluctant, delaying King on his planned civil disobedience to assure voting rights for African Americans in the South, because as the film Johnson suggests, he has many other things on his political plate.
    To the film’s credit, this is not a fair characterization of its portrait of Johnson, who eventually willingly leads a voting rights act through Congress and gives a nationally televised speech assuring the viewer at the end, echoing the civil rights anthem, “We shall overcome.” In fact some of Johnson’s best moments in the film come when he sits down in the Oval Office with King’s (and the film’s) true antagonist, a slimy nasty Governor George Wallace, and uses a variety of encouragement and disparagement, including four-letter words and “good ole’ boy” comments, to sway Wallace to be far more flexible and to remind him of his egalitarian roots. Joseph Califano, a former Johnson aide, has come to the President’s defense and advised people not to see the film (it’s this kind of silliness that some historical films engender) because he maintains Johnson was far more in favor of voting rights than the film portrays him. Perhaps it’s telling that the man who would appear today to know most about Lyndon Baines Johnson, Robert Caro, the biographer with four volumes already out on the President’s life, has remained mute in this controversy.
    The film does some justice to the history in reminding us there were three marches across the Edmund Pettus bridge, neatly increasing the drama and the tension, from the first, where King and the marchers are met with police violence and disperse; to the second, where they are apparently invited by the police parting ways, to march, but King turns around; to the third, where their ranks are swelled by prominent figures from across the U.S. and backed up by uniformed U.S. Army soldiers, and complete their march to Montgomery and the state capitol of Alabama.
    Somewhere in its treatment of “history,” which is, in this case after all, what we all know or can know, is the murky problem of King’s speeches. I realized, as I watched the film, that though the actor’s cadences were those of King, none of the speeches seemed particularly memorable or outstanding; then I learned that the director, Ava DuVernay, herself wrote these King speeches, since she was unable to obtain the rights to the ones King actually gave, because Steven Spielberg owns these rights (for a planned film biography of King). To me, that makes the film significantly disappointing, but it is simply one of the inherent problems in filming history.

Copyright © 2015 by Jonathan Price