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Showing posts with label biopic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label biopic. Show all posts
Thursday, December 25, 2014
Thursday, December 25, 2014
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Will no one rid me of these troublesome biopics?! After suffering through 2014's Jersey Boys, Jimi: All is By My Side, Get On Up, The Butler, The Imitation Game, The Invisible Woman, and Saving Mr Banks I am just about done with watching screenwriters trying to pop a neat thematic bow on top of the sumptuously packaged 'greatest hits' of some notable so and so. So who's on the slate today? Stephen Hawking? Right, fine, whatever. Roll the film.
The Theory of Everything charts Hawking's (Eddie Redmayne)'s relationship with Jane Hawking (Felicity Jones). We begin in 1960s Cambridge, where we first meet the young physicist bouncing down the cobbled streets on a rickety bicycle. With his goofy grin and oversize glasses he looks a little like Austin Powers' academic younger brother. He soon proves to all that he's a genius physicist, and wins the heart and mind of the lovely Jane. Yup, looks like everything's going to work out beautifully for Stephen Hawking.
Then his body decides to eat itself. Stricken with Motor Neurone Disease he's informed that his nervous system is going to shut down and in two years he's going to be dead. Quite reasonably he holes himself up in his room, wraps himself in a blanket and feels exceedingly miserable for himself. But with the fragrant Jane for assistance he finds vast inner reserves of personal strength and decides he won't let this horrible disease stop him from living or completing his life's work. By and large you know the rest of the story; Hawking is a wonderful example of human fortitude to us all blah blah blah.
To be fair to the film there is some genuinely good stuff in here. For a hungry young actor there can be few roles with Oscar-bait written all over them as much as Stephen Hawking. You get to play a witty man overcoming cruel fate, not to mention having to deal with tricky performance limitations: first having to manage subtle facial tics, then being confined to a wheelchair and finally unable to speak or move altogether. Redmayne has clearly done his homework on Motor Neurone disease, effortlessly conveying the slow bodily horror of one portion of your body shutting down after another. In the final scenes he's restricted to just a flicker of his eyes and a curl of his lip, but you can see the echoes of the lively 1960s Hawking in him.
The supporting cast are no slouches either. Felicity Jones has to balance keeping the audience's sympathies while slowly falling out of love with Hawking, which she makes look deceptively easy. This is especially impressive given that Jane Hawking is a curiously underwritten character, especially so given that this is an adaptation of her biography. David Thewlis is also a totally steady pair of hands as Hawking's professor, whose stern demeanour gradually melts into protective paternity as he recognises both Hawking's incredible intelligence and his personal bravery in dealing with his condition.
So why does this film suck? It sucks because it presents Stephen Hawking's greatest achievement as overcoming his disability rather than his work in physics. As far as Anthony McCarten's screenplay is concerned, Hawking may as well be a wizard for all the efforts it makes to understand what he does. There's a moment early in the film that sums it up; Hawking and his classmates are given some 'impossible' equations to solve by Thewlis' professor. Everybody is stunned into silence when it turns out Hawking has managed to 'only' solve 7 out of 8 of them. It's impressed upon us that this is a huge feat but it falls flat as we have no context or explanation why this is impressive. Look! He's solved equations! I mean, we don't know what equations they were but that doesn't matter right? What more proof do you need that he's smart?!
Similarly, when we see the blackboards full of complex formulae they're presented as an achievement in and of themselves, something that's apparently impressive purely because the characters are doing it. As the film develops you slowly realise that there's going to be no real explanation of why Stephen Hawking is such a remarkable man, consequently there's the sense that the film is treating its audience like a big bunch of morons who only want to see a sappy sob-story-of-the-week terminal illness story.
There is some philosophical meat in the film, but it's a tired old debate between Christianity and science, a half-baked exploration of the confluence between high level physics and spirituality. This is tired ground that's been stomped into soupy mud by countless dramatic boots before it. Hawking's science might be beyond intuitive human understanding and perhaps difficult for mainstream audiences to wrap their heads around. But then Hawking himself did it in his bestselling A Brief History of Time (which famously only contains a single equation: E=mc2). Even within cinema, Errol Morris' fantastic documentary A Brief History of Time (1991) conveys Hawking's theories in crystal clarity (with a kickin' rad Philip Glass soundtrack).
The Theory of Everything, in its breathless quest to foreground the tragedy of Hawking's, ends up as emotional pornography. "Oh, this poor man!" we end up thinking, sympathising with him as we greedily guzzle up his suffering. For my money it's not even a great film about MND, certainly not a patch on the excellent but deeply disturbing documentary I Am Breathing, which chronicles the slow death of Neil Pratt from the disease.
Despite Redmayne's excellent performance and the general competence of the filmmaking The Theory of Everything is lobotomised, the grandeur of Hawking's discoveries reduced to fuzzy-wuzzy ponderings about faith. The film casually takes for granted that Hawking's science is too much for audiences. It isn't.
★★
The Theory of Everything is released January 1st.
Saturday, November 15, 2014
Saturday, November 15, 2014
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Get on Up opens with a drugged-out, incoherent, psychotic, shotgun wielding James Brown marching around an insurance brokerage. He's babbling an incomprehensible stream of consciousness, punctuated with barks of his own name. Helpless bystanders cower under their chairs as *boom!* his shotgun blows a hole in the ceiling. What has driven him to these towering heights of rage?
Someone took a shit in one of his toilets and didn't flush.
James Brown was insane. Get on Up makes no bones about this. What Tate Taylor does is try to divine the precise nature of this insanity. We begin in rural South Carolina where James Brown (Jamarion Scott, Jordan Scott and Chadwick Boseman) lives in a kind of mega-poverty. Dressed in rags, he lives with his violent parents in a run-down shack in the middle of the woods. He soon 'upgrades' to working in a whorehouse, sharing a small bed with a grossly obese man and hustling soldiers towards the hookers.
Things look pretty shit for James Brown. Then one day he wanders into a church and, in a neat echo of The Blues Brothers, sees a charismatic preacher strutting about the place and decides that this is his kinda thing. Get on Up proceeds to jump around Brown's life while maintaining a very loose chronology. We get to see his rise to fame through the sixties, his rise to genuine superstardom in the 70s and his crowning as 'The Godfather of Soul' and hints of substance abuse to come.
There's been an awful lot of sixties music biopics recently and an awful lot of those have been bad. Just in the last few months All Is By My Side made a tuneless hash of Jimi Hendrix's life and Jersey Boys stunk up the place with its soundtrack of squeaky clean bozo pop. Frankly I'm getting a bit bored of scenes set inside knobs n' dials sixties recording studio where everyone is wearing turtlenecks and stupid glasses. Give me something new for god's sake!
Fortunately while Get on Up does indeed feature precisely that scene, it's couched within a film that's not afraid to get weird. Given that Brown was a raving egomaniac shifts towards the strange aren't so surprising, but nonetheless there's a psychedelic, almost cosmic atmosphere that often surprises.
For example, Brown frequently breaks the fourth wall, winking and smirking at the audience. The effect is to remind us that we're being told James Brown's story from the perspective of James Brown, allowing us a peek into a perspective where James Brown is god and everything revolves around him. Exploring this warped mind throws up some hypnotic, subtle moments of magical realism. The preacher that initiates the young Brown into performance has clawed talons for fingers, a children's bare-knuckle boxing match gradually morphs into a soul funk strut and a climactic scene Brown is literally pursued by the ghosts of his past during a high speed chase with police.
These moments are the high points of the film, the surreal qualities rising until the film teeters and sways as if it's on the verge of collapse. The best music biopics aren't afraid to criticise their subjects – to show them at rock bottom as well as on top. Get on Up, with its slightly disconnected, fractured look at James Brown at least has the guts to show him beating his wife, lost in drug-addled stupors and being a total twat to his long-suffering band.
Admittedly Get on Up glosses over just how large James Brown's propensity for beating women was, not to mention his his enthusiastic campaigning for Richard Nixon to become President and his dumbass 'bootstraps' philosophy of Black Capitalism. But even leaving those out we're still left with an idea of James Brown as someone you wouldn't like to meet, let alone work with.
There's a neat friction between this and the simple fact the James Brown is one hell of a performer. Any worries about his delusional psychosis are swept away as you watch him groove his way across a stage with the audience in the palm of his hand - he's talented enough to get away with being crazy. Chadwick Boseman captures this on-stage/off-stage dichtomy perfectly, allowing us to peer quizzically at a very very odd person, but never to poke fun at him. Granted, Boseman is aided in the live performances by Brown's vocals being dubbed over his own, but his physical performance is so strong that the effect is invisible.
The only places the film comes undone are in some slightly iffy pacing issues. At nearly two and a half hours there are moments where the film feels rather flabby; and as we watch yet another scene of the young Brown in miserable poverty we find ourselves wishing we can get to the fun parts where he starts singing the hits. The closing scenes of the film are similarly rather superfluous, the performances drowned out by a sea of unconvincing old-age latex prostheses glued to the actor's faces.
I came out of this shuffling and boogying, happily humming snippets of James Brown's eminently catchy discography. It's an interesting, occasionally brave, portrait of a madman. Watching someone slowly lose themselves inside an ego and slide into violence and drug abuse is, at minimum, interesting, and the best bits of Get on Up are spent wondering just what the hell this maniac is going to do next. An above average entry to the bulging music biopic canon, but not quite an essential one.
★★★
Get on Up is released November 21st
Sunday, February 3, 2013
Sunday, February 3, 2013
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When does the past become myth? While it's easy to relate to life in say, the 1960s, events further back become blurred, a sense of how things really were becomes difficult to grasp. Out of this historical fog strides Woody Guthrie, carrying a guitar immortally emblazoned "THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS". Though he died in 1967 he's a man of the 30s and 40s, a man of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, discrimination against 'Okies' and vicious attacks on unionised labour. He's very much a man of his time, a hitchhiking troubadour with an acoustic guitar and a head full of songs to lift the spirits of desperate migrant workers. I think Steve Earle described Woody Guthrie best:
"He was the living embodiment of everything a people's revolution is supposed to be about: that working people have dignity, intelligence and value above and beyond the market's demand for their labour"
'Woody Sez' is a biography of Woody Guthrie, telling the man's life story using his songs. I was a little curious when I heard about this musical, Woody's humble style doesn't seem to lend itself to a stage production. There's zero bombast and a total lack of ego in his songs, and I had vague nightmares of jazzed up chorus lines singing along to 'This Land is Your Land'. Thankfully there's none of that here, this is a stripped down show, austere in its staging and intelligent in design.
Woody's story is told by four outstanding performers, as skilled in acting as they are musically talented. David M. Lutken plays Woody, and Ruth Clarke-Irons, Helen J Russell and William Wolfe Hogan play various characters in Woody's life. As I entered the theatre, the four were sitting relaxed at the front of the stage, chatting with the audience and playing instrumental Woody Guthrie songs. This breaks down the barriers between the cast and audience right away, allowing us to view the myriad characters we meet as familiar friends. Furthering this demolition of the barrier between performers and audience is the total lack of any amplification from the stage. Everything is played acoustically, with no microphones.
It's a shock to the system at first. I'm accustomed to concerts and plays blaring music as loud as is legally permissible, initially everything seems quiet and muted. Very quickly you become attuned to it, and I was surprised how effective simply hearing the music directly from the guitar or singer was in creating authenticity. A lack of electrification makes sense for multiple reasons, firstly and most obviously because it's period appropriate. It also gently prods the audience into shutting up and paying attention to the music rather than chatting to each other. But most importantly, and what this tactic adds up to is a definite connection of the life and philosophy of Woody Guthrie to a modern audience.
Before the financial crash of 2008 'Woody Sez' may have felt slightly quaint. The fire in songs like 'Jolly Banker' and 'I Ain't Got No Home' can never go out, but still, they speak of a battle long since passed. But now, as global capitalism convulses these words regain the immediacy they had when Woody sang them in the 30s and 40s. Woody Guthrie's condemnation of the victimisation of the poor rings as clear as bell in a country where the government is doubling down on austerity. Seeing a show like this is a useful reminder that the rich blaming the poor for the poverty inflicted upon them is not a new thing. Bankers and politicians gamble the livelihoods and dignity of the working class away just as easily now as they did in the 30s and 40s.
All of these performers are fantastic musicians, and all get their individual chances to shine. Considering that pretty much all the songs are led by an acoustic guitar, the sound never gets samey. A huge variety of period accurate instruments are played, from a banjo and double bass, to dulcimers and even,enjoyably, the spoons! Even though the songs can be musically similar, the varied arrangements stop any boredom setting in.
David M. Lutken's Woody is an immediately likeable character. Woody Guthrie is known primarily through his music rather than in a physical sense, a fact that gives Lutken a broad canvas to work on. You never feel like he's doing an impression or imitation, it's more that he's embodying a certain optimistic, kind spirit. Throughout the course of the show, we go from light-hearted comedy moments to some pretty pitch-black depressing stuff. Woody Guthrie didn't have the cheeriest of lives and time and time again a member of his family will burn to death. If proof were needed that the cast has the audience in the palm of their hand it's the hushed silence when Lutken falls to his knees in grief upon hearing the death of his daughter.
If I have to head down to Croydon for a show then it'd better something pretty damn amazing. I'm pleased to say 'Woody Sez' was well worth the trip. It's a modest show, friendly and welcoming, but one with an unbending sense of social justice. Here we see Woody Guthrie mythologised as a Tom Joad figure, nobly fighting for the little guy, epitomising artistic resistance against exploitative ideology. This is cleverly balanced with a portrait of a normal, flawed man who makes mistakes, suffers and loves his way through a difficult life. 'Woody Sez' is an outstandingly well-performed and politically subversive show, one that underlines the relevance of a man whose poetic soul we should all hope to emulate.
'Woody Sez' is playing at:
4 February - Buxton Opera House, Buxton
5 - 6 February - Sheffield Crucible, Sheffield
7 - 9 February - The Lowry, Salford Quays
11 - 13 February - Harrogate Theatre, Harrogate
14 - 16 February - Theatre Royal, Wakefield
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