Why most biopics suck

I seem to have reviewed a fair number of biopics in the last year or so -- Brian Wilson, Miles Davis and Edward Snowden, to name a few -- and I always find myself either using or resisting the urge to use what has now become a cliched descriptor for them: "cradle-to-grave." The standard construction of a biopic is so very standard -- showing us the subject from early years to usually premature death -- that it becomes relevant to talk about it, no matter whether the movie in question is adhering to or deviating from those norms. Essentially, you're mentioning it every time, if you let yourself.

But there's another thing that makes the standard biopic dull, even when it eschews the subject's childhood and teenage years, as more and more are seeming to do.

Simply put, just watching a person jump in and out of marriages, drug addictions and fights is pretty damn boring.

That's the fatal flaw with the Hank Williams biopic I Saw the Light. The saving grace even of movies with that second blueprint is that they are at least supposed to give us good exposure to the subject's art or other contribution to society. But I must say I don't have that much better of an idea of Williams as an artist as I did before I started watching.

Yeah, you get minute-long clips of Williams singing this song or that, to add flavor. But the thing it's adding flavor to is bland, and the flavor added is also bland.

Tom Hiddleston does his best. So does Elizabeth Olsen. In fact, I Saw the Light provided the occasion for me to contemplate -- not for the first time, of course -- how good an actress Olsen actually is. She even makes thankless material sing. ("Sing" is probably the wrong term for this particular character, a would-be vocal accompaniment to her husband who just doesn't have the talent.)

The acting is not usually the problem in a biopic, since they usually get good actors to appear in them.

No, it's all that drinking, whoring and fighting.

Actually, I think there's only one fight -- one physical fight, anyway -- in I Saw the Light. But the scene is so contrived that it stakes a claim to a larger share of the film's overall triteness. It comes in the film's first ten minutes, when a random audience member decides to start talking shit about Williams even though he has done nothing to provoke it. When Williams finally responds with a comment that is totally innocuous, it angers the blood of the spectator so much that he rushes the stage and tackles Williams. Perhaps there really was an incident like that in Williams' life -- it's hardly an interesting enough incident to include in the movie, so its details hardly need to be correct -- but it is executed so poorly that it rings utterly false. On the other hand, in the wake of Donald Trump's election, a hick who gets angry for no reason and resorts to violence feels depressingly true to life.

From here it's a bunch of "I love you Hank, I don't love you Hank, I'm leaving you Hank, I'm giving you another chance Hank, I promise to stop drinking, I can't stop drinking, I promise to stop cheating, I can't stop cheating." Yawn.

It makes a person question the value of the biopic as an art form at all. This is probably an accurate depiction of what Williams' life was like. But it doesn't translate into compelling material. If we can't tell the truth about somebody's life (this movie) and we can't tell fiction about somebody's life in an attempt to make it more interesting (Miles Ahead), then what can we offer?

I guess some of it depends on the skill of the filmmakers. Maybe writer-director Marc Abraham is not all that skilled, despite being a producer on one of my favorite films, Children of Men. Perhaps Bill Pohlad and his writers on Love & Mercy, Oren Moverman and Michael Alan Lerner, are that much more skilled, giving Brian Wilson's life the dynamic treatment that Abraham couldn't for Williams.

I Saw the Light ends with one last reminder of the built-in problem of most biopics, and indeed, many films in general where the character needs a last scene but doesn't know it will be his or her last. Williams died of what was diagnosed as a heart attack while in the back of a car, being driven to a gig. His actual death appears off-screen, reported at the gig by a shaken promoter. But before he drives off, Williams parts from his loved ones (who don't love him much anymore by this point) with a long, sad, significant look in his eyes, a consummate "This is the last time I will see you" look. The character couldn't know that, but the actor, the director, and everyone else involved certainly did.

As I suggested, it's a problem of many films where characters die unexpectedly. But I guess the problem with biopics is that they tend to take on the most cliched elements of all films, and present them to us in one uninspired package.

In almost all cases, the subject deserved a better tribute.

The actor's modesty

I was listening to an interview with Tom Hiddleston about his Hank Williams biopic I Saw the Light, which is now in theaters, and he made an innocuous comment that struck me.

Talking about his experience on another film, Hiddleston said, "I made a film with Guillermo del Toro called Crimson Peak," and then continued on with whatever his point was.

It struck me as incredibly modest, even though in the wrong hands it could have seemed like false modesty.

Two things about that comment showed charming modesty, I thought. For starters, he was reporting it as news, that he had made a film with this well-known director, like almost everyone listening to the interview wouldn't already be aware of the latest film by the director of Pan's Labyrinth and Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and Hiddleston's involvement in it. The second charming part was that he revealed the name as though that in itself were a piece of information that needed to be divulged, never once taking for granted that the listener might already know of the movie.

But it occurred to me that this type of thing doesn't always work. There comes a point where a movie is well known enough that to pretend your audience doesn't know it would just be insulting them.

Like if Harrison Ford said, "I made a film with George Lucas called Star Wars," you'd say, "Duh, Harrison -- we know what Star Wars is." And you'd be a little bit annoyed because you'd know Harrison knew you knew. It wouldn't help much to switch it up to, "I made a little film with George Lucas called Star Wars," because even though the word "little" changes the inflection of the comment -- now we know he's joking, because everyone knows Star Wars is not "little" -- it still has the effect of kind of big-upping himself. The very acknowledgement of its size indicates that you are overly proud of that size.

So in that case, to seem normal, Ford would just have to say, "On Star Wars we ..." and get on with the comment or anecdote. There that would be okay. It wouldn't be modest per se, but it wouldn't insult our intelligence either, and when you've appeared in four Star Wars movies and four Indiana Jones movies, excess modesty probably doesn't fit very well anyway.

But Crimson Peak is about the perfect sized film to maintain that modesty, and Hiddleston about the perfect level of star. He's not a household name yet, and with his underlying eccentricity, may never become one. But he did play Loki in The Avengers, one of the highest grossing films of all time, so it's not like he's Mr. Anonymous either.

Hiddleston continued to charm me with his lack of pretension about himself and his genuine humility. Later on the interviewer made a comparison between his character in I Saw the Light and his character in Only Lovers Left Alive, and Hiddleston was so chuffed by the comparison (even though it didn't take any particular display of cleverness by the interviewer to make it) that he revealed an anecdote from the set -- an anecdote he would have held back if the interviewer hadn't prompted him by mentioning the Jim Jarmusch movie from 2014. It was an interesting anecdote that had a lot of relevance to the discussion, but he would have kept it tucked away if the interviewer hadn't given him a clear opening. Why? Modesty. You don't tell war stories about other movies during an interview unless given a darn good reason -- it's kind of the equivalent of name dropping. (And lest you consider his original mention of Crimson Peak to have been a case of telling war stories/name dropping, I can assure you it did not come across that way -- though neither do I remember the point he was actually making.)

Another time he seemed genuinely flattered by the interviewer's praise of his performance, like he might have been receiving such praise for the first time in his career -- like he had never before considered the idea that someone might consider what he does to be good.

There was an interesting secondary display of modesty in this interview, this time by the director, Marc Abraham, who did the interview alongside his star. Rather than modesty, it was actually a way to display your pride over your own work without seeming in the slightest like that's what you're doing -- and in fact seeming quite magnanimous in the process.

Abraham said that both Hiddleston and co-star Elizabeth Olsen were "so great" in the film, or something along those lines. To be clear, this didn't strike me at all as bragging about the quality of the film, because the praise was clearly directed at the stars, as if he himself bore no responsibility for extracting good performances from them. However, if you unpack the comment, it is a suggestion that something about the film itself is "great," so as the de facto author of the film, he is indeed sort of praising himself. It's funny that creative types can get away with this, heaping praise on one another without implicitly also praising themselves. Just to reinforce his own sense of personal modesty, Abraham, while describing certain directing luminaries whose styles were an influence on him, explained, "I'm not saying at all that I am that quality of filmmaker" -- not those exact words, but something more succinctly self-deprecating. And indeed, it honestly didn't feel like he was saying that.

The interesting thing is that both these genuinely refreshing personas must be an act on some level, even as genuine as they seem. If not Abraham, a guy I've never heard of before, then certainly Hiddleston, who has been through numerous press junkets already in his five or so years of high visibility as an actor. You do so many interviews and get so many questions from interviewers who are each trying to find something profound and unexpected to ask, but are invariably covering much of the same territory. It can't really be possible to be genuinely charmed by and appreciative of each interviewer, though Hiddleston did it masterfully, and his director followed his lead.

And now I really would like to see I Saw the Light, a biopic of a person who otherwise wouldn't interest me (and seems like a strange fit indeed for the effete Hiddleston), just to see how good of a job these two guys really did do in their respective roles.