A Hijacked Life: Examining the Biopic Heist

Milk, Murrow, Dylan - is it the man or the character I connect with?

By: Rob Turbovsky
Published: Tuesday, December 16th 2008 at 3:16 AM

I could hear the audience laugh, hard, at the comedic lines in Gus Van Sant's new biopic Milk. I could feel them sigh and fidget, equally as hard, during the difficult moments. And, I wondered: would they be reacting this way if this were a film about a fictional gay rights activist and not Harvey Milk? If this were a political drama, not a biopic, would the aura of importance and Oscar buzz be as inevitable and unquestionable?

I think the answer to that second question is probably yes: anything Van Sant or star Sean Penn is associated with is usually (and rightly) prime for critical adoration, though Penn didn't even chew the scenery before swallowing it in the bloated mess of All The King's Men. But, the first question troubles me, not because Milk is a particularly bad biopic — it actually has a lot more vigor and nuance than most of them — but because it seemed to me that, beyond paying tribute, there is something insidious about Hollywood's "based on a true life" films. When the photograph was invented, there were people who wondered if taking someone's photo would imprison their soul. Didn't anybody have the same worry when the first biopic came out?

Here's how I see every "major event" film being conceived, and I'm sorry if this sounds paranoid: a dozen Hollywood executives meet at midnight at a castle that only appears once every Oscar season. Over a meal of still-breathing production assistants and pure heroin, they discuss the need to make an important movie. "But, how do we know what's important?" one executive asks. "We're empty inside, and we only care about money."

"That didn't stop Sarah Palin," another executive answers.

"I have an idea. What are the hot issues of today?" the first asks.

"They're going to make me forego my bonus this year. How am I supposed to live on just $30 million in stock options? Can we make a movie about that?" someone chimes in.

"We should make ten movies about that!" another replies.

"No, no, no. We need to go bigger! Grander! More importanter!" the first executive screams. "This has to be the most importantest movie ever made! Until they make that third Batman, anyway!"

"Ahhh… Batman…"

"Quit panting Alan."

"What if we take an important person who made a significant contribution to society, and then we make a movie about them? Then people will get confused into thinking our movie is important and a significant contribution to society too!"

"Come on. Sure, the public is dumb. Borderline mouth-breathers. They'd watch a motionless cluster of cells for two hours as long as there was torture or breasts. But you think they'll actually fall for something terrible that just happens to be associated with someone great?"

"Hey, it worked for Ray."

"And for Sarah Palin."

Ultimately, every biopic — well-intentioned and honestly conceived or not — is hijacking the life of its subject for narrative gain. There is an obvious danger in trivializing a person's achievements by throwing them haphazardly into a three-act structure. It either makes their remarkable life story indistinguishable from that of any fictional character who lives, fails, learns and succeeds in 120 script pages (Ray), or it uses the pre-existing audience associations with that figure to score dramatic points that it doesn't deserve. In Milk, a few of the dramatic beats — a minority but a noticeable one – seemed to elicit responses way out of proportion to what the filmmakers had earned. In effect, we are laughing, crying, cheering because we are thinking of Harvey Milk the man and not Harvey Milk the Sean Penn character. The former would be fine is this were a documentary (and, indeed, there are some great documentaries on Harvey Milk). But, the latter makes me feel like I'm being taken advantage of, like my warm feelings are being used to plug the holes where the film's ideas should be.

Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan in I'm Not There
Photo: The Weinstein Co.

There are some solutions here. I think Todd Haynes anticipated the problem with his wildly experimental Bob Dylan biopic I'm Not There. Because there is such a wide range of ideas the public already has about Dylan, a conventional biopic would have been disastrous. People would bring to it too many misconceptions to give the film a chance of working. Haynes instead used an abstract approach that reintroduces us to Bob Dylan with a half-dozen characters representing aspects of Dylan, while not quite Dylan himself. Of course, it's hard to see how this approach would work with anyone else. But, the idea of tailoring the form and not just the content of the biopic to suit the subject is an important one. George Clooney's Good Night and Good Luck is ostensibly a story about Edward R. Murrow, but Clooney ratchets up the tension and McCarthy-era paranoia by making it an ensemble piece. It might've been a tough sell for a movie called Milk to be about anyone but Harvey Milk, but the film's most successful moments involve Harvey's quiet moments with his lover (James Franco), not of his political campaigning. In the spirit of Milk's call for understanding, there is also a bravely sympathetic portrayal of Dan White (Josh Brolin), a man whose role in the film will remain hidden for those that don't know the story.

I doubt the mainstream biopic is in danger of changing anytime soon. But, for future filmmakers, I hope they learn the lessons of the people they mean to immortalize on film. Milk, Murrow, Dylan — if they meant to inspire us, they certainly didn't mean for us to worship them. We ought to use that inspiration to make something new and something challenging. Otherwise, it's just a surrender to the status quo they themselves became famous for fighting.