This article added to my appreciation of what goes into creating biographical films, also known as Biopics.
FILM - GLORIOUS DISSOLUTION : MUSICIANS ON FILM
By STEVE CHAGOLLAN
Published: June 3, 2007
NEW YORK TIMES
IN ''Last Days,'' Gus Van Sant's meditation on the demise of Kurt Cobain, a record executive confronts the incoherent, drug-addled ''Blake'' about what he will tell his daughter. ''Do you say,'' she asks, '' 'I'm sorry I'm a rock 'n' roll cliché'?''
The line between fact and cliché has always been rather tenuous when it comes to movies about famous musicians, considering that so many have tread the same self-destructive path. While their event-filled, often tragic stories entice filmmakers, they also complicate the task of transcending material that can seem old hat or veer into parody.
Thanks in large part to the successes of ''Ray'' and ''Walk the Line,'' that cinematic tightrope will be attempted many times in the coming months. On Friday ''La Vie en Rose,'' with Marion Cotillard as the hard-drinking Parisian chanteuse Édith Piaf, opens in New York and Los Angeles. On Aug. 1 there will be ''El Cantante,'' starring Marc Anthony as the salsa king Hector Lavoe, whose struggle with drugs cut his life short. This fall Todd Haynes's ''I'm Not There'' will offer a fanciful take on Bob Dylan. Also completed is ''Control,'' about Ian Curtis, the Joy Division frontman, who committed suicide, which has been picked up for an American release by the Weinstein Company. And then there are the films in development, including a Janis Joplin biopic starring Zooey Deschanel, Don Cheadle's portrait of Miles Davis and a project about Keith Moon, the Who's drummer, starring Mike Myers.
Movies about famous musicians date back at least to the 1940s, when Cary Grant played Cole Porter in ''Night and Day,'' with no hint of that songwriter's homosexuality. These early films often glossed over the more controversial aspects of an entertainer's life and career or avoided them altogether.
The template for a more sensational approach was helped along by ''The Gene Krupa Story'' (1959), with Sal Mineo playing the jazz drummer as a man haunted by his father's disapproval. In the film Krupa achieves sudden fame and wealth, only to fall from grace through drink and drugs. In the end he achieves redemption through the love of a good woman.
''In America, when you talk about films about musicians, we have reached a point where there's almost a formula you plug in,'' said Todd Boyd, professor of critical studies at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. ''Somebody who came from humble beginnings, who is innovative, who's a visionary, who has exceptional talent. They succeed against the odds, then once they succeed, oftentimes the pathology and dysfunction from their childhood comes back and takes over their life. In some cases they get redeemed, in other cases not. Oftentimes there will be a spouse or a partner through whom the story is told. And if you've seen one of these, you've seen a million.''
The director of ''La Vie en Rose,'' Olivier Dahan, doesn't flinch from tackling such all-too-familiar terrain; he embraces it in his film, which gives a largely American genre an impressionistic feel. He explicitly draws a parallel between Piaf and her spiritual double, Billie Holiday, when Ms. Cotillard's Piaf proudly proclaims that they were born the same year.
The mirror images are clear: Piaf and Holiday endured poverty growing up, spending part of their youth in brothels; both were untrained singers with distinctive voices borne of pain and suffering; and both died prematurely, aged beyond their years from drug and alcohol abuse.
''I don't believe that to be a great artist you have to be tormented,'' Mr. Dahan said. But, he added, the very qualities that help musicians as artists may also render them vulnerable.
''Maybe there is something about being fragile,'' he said. ''And to be fragile is to also be very receptive. You can't be a great artist and not be fragile, so when you are fragile everything kind of hits you, the good and the bad for sure.'' Sometimes context is all. Leon Ichaso, the director of ''El Cantante'' -- about Hector Lavoe, a Puerto Rican transplant who gained fame as a salsa singer in New York -- said his protagonist's heroin addiction must be viewed as something more than the price of fame.
''Music has always been linked to drugs,'' he said, ''but in the case of Hector there's the element of displacement, which is very painful at times -- the experience of leaving it all behind, being a total fish out of water.''
For Peter Newman, the producer of ''The Gospel According to Janis,'' the Joplin story -- competing versions of which have been linked over the years to Lili Taylor, Lindsay Lohan, Melissa Etheridge and Pink -- represents a chance to undo previous cinematic fictions. As a Joplinesque singer in ''The Rose'' Bette Midler so embodies the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll lifestyle that her character overdoses onstage in front of thousands of fans. ''The Rose'' ''was really a vehicle for Bette Midler to vamp,'' Mr. Newman said, adding that ''it really did not resemble Janis at all.''
But capturing Joplin's true nature has proven a formidable task.
''Over 10 years I have yet to meet any two people who agree who Janis was or what motivated her or what they meant to her,'' Mr. Newman said. ''The especially unique thing about Janis is that everyone seems to have a completely different point of view as to what she was about.''
Todd Haynes wrestles with that problem in ''I'm Not There,'' by having several actors (including Heath Ledger, Richard Gere and Cate Blanchett) play Mr. Dylan at different stages of his career. Mr. Haynes described the movie as ''almost like a psychic debate between different selves.'' Like his fictional paean to glam rock, ''Velvet Goldmine,'' he views the Dylan story as being about ''self-invention at every level.''
As soon as he became the epitome of anything, he'd have to run from it,'' Mr. Haynes said. The challenge has been avoiding what Peter Guralnick, the author of the Elvis Presley biography ''Last Train to Memphis,'' calls ''the whole hagiographic approach'': stringing together the best-known moments from an artist's career like so many Life magazine snapshots. ''You lose any sense of character and you end up having these tableaus of familiar scenes which never have the same impact as the actual moments,'' he said.
As for fulfilling fans' expectations, or that of the historians, Mr. Guralnick doesn't consider that an issue. ''For example, the picture of Johnny Cash in 'Walk the Line' is much diminished from the picture not only that fans might have but from the real Johnny Cash,'' he said. ''And yet it certainly didn't keep people away.''
LINK:
http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricte...DAF0894DF40448
