Six Biopics That Avoid Most (If Not All) the Irritating Reductionist Aspects of the Genre

SCREEN

By Matt Prigge

Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Nov. 21, 2007

I'm Not There

Young Mr. Lincoln (1939): Mythologizing historical greats is run of the mill, but Henry Fonda's Honest Abe never even gets to that fuzzy beard, much less the stovepipe hat. Instead we watch him as an idealistic but shrewd lawyer winning a major case, only to face the film's metaphorical final image: an oncoming storm.

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985): Most biopics lie through their teeth, struggling to pummel a life into some kind of narrative shape. When making a film on Yukio Mishima, the right-wing Japanese novelist who committed seppuku in 1970, director Paul Schrader received one stipulation from his widow: He could use only the printed facts. Schrader's solution? Mix up black-and-white flashbacks, gaudily colorful scenes from his novels and a recreation of his notorious final day into a thick academic stew.

Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn-Gould (1993): From interviews and random moments from his life to a leftfield animated segment, Fran�ois Girard's scattershot, impressionistic take on the eccentric Canadian pianist knows more than any other film that a life cannot be remotely contained in a movie.

Topsy-Turvy (1999): Mike Leigh's film on operetta-ists Gilbert and Sullivan shows them making The Mikado ... and nothing else. No decades-spanning breadth, no jostling with the truth to make a better story, no broad generalizations--just intense focus on evoking one small slither of history.

Domino (2005): The daughter of The Manchurian Candidate's Laurence Harvey, Domino was a privileged fashion model turned bounty hunter. Pretty nuts, huh? Well, not nuts enough for screenwriter Richard Kelly (late of Southland Tales). Seemingly a knock on the factual felicities inherent in all biopics, Domino moves the time from the '90s to now, throws in Ian Ziering and Brian Austin Greene as "themselves" and adds a lot of wicked gunplay and stripteases that likely never occurred. It's unwatchable, but it's still better than Ray.

I'm Not There (2007): And you thought the others on this list were radical.