Having just watched the overwhelmingly underwhelming Bob Marley: One Love, I have decided that Hollywood’s obsession with biopics must be stopped. Biopics have become so ubiquitous, so pervasive, so unoriginal, that Kingsley Ben-Adir, who plays Marley in the film, has already starred in two other biopics: The Comey Rule as Barack Obama and One Night in Miami as Malcolm X.
A biopic can feel like little more than a Wikipedia page
Real-life stories have become so popular that this year we will be treated to not one, but two dramatisations of Prince Andrew’s disastrous BBC Newsnight interview. Will they offer anything more than a competition between who has the better hair and make up teams, or who can make sure the actor playing Andrew does not sweat under the lights?
Biopics are mostly boring and predictable because they tend to fall into one of three categories. The first is a voyeuristic spectacle of suffering, usually on a female subject: think Renee Zellwegger as a slurring Judy Garland, Naomi Ackie as an overdosing Whitney Houston, or Ana de Armas as a self-harming Marilyn Monroe, in a film that is really little more than ‘thinly-veiled trauma porn’. Hollywood loves to fetishise famous women who destroyed themselves: Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Christine Chubbuck, and now, Amy Winehouse. Given how much Winehouse’s life (and death) has already been picked over for profit, I am not sure what more can possibly be gained by replaying her addictions on the silver screen, other than a morbid enjoyment of watching talented young women fail.
The second category of biopic is the imitation game: an exercise in embodiment and impersonation, to the point that the film becomes little more than an extended Saturday Night Live impression. We love to hear about the lengths actors go to transform themselves for a role, whether that’s Austin Butler permanently changing his voice after playing Elvis, Gary Oldman giving himself nicotine poisoning playing Winston Churchill in The Darkest Hour, or Cillian Murphy eating only an almond a day to lose weight for Oppenheimer. Yet there is a fine line between authenticity and gross parody: think Remi Malek’s teeth as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody (surely the largest in cinematic history), or Leonardo di Caprio’s overcooked old-man latex prosthetics in J. Edgar.
Nonetheless, the second category continues to be the perfect awards-bait. Since 2000, 12 of the Oscars for Best Actor have gone to famous men playing famous men, and 11 of the Oscars for Best Actress have gone to famous women playing famous women. In 2022, three out of the five Best Actress and Best Actor nominees were based on real people, even though it is arguably more of an acting challenge to create a new, fully-believable character from scratch than it is to mimic someone else’s mannerisms. Regardless, Hollywood continues to overlook and over-reward: for example, Daniel Kaluuya didn’t win his Academy Award for his game-changing performance in Get Out (there are few shots as iconic in recent cinematic history as his wide-eyed, teary stare) but for his role as real-life activist Fred Hampton in Judas and the Black Messiah.
The third and final category is the biopic that is more fiction than fact: more interested in the sensational or sentimental than the historically accurate. Sometimes it is to santise, as in the case of Bohemian Rhapsody, which pointedly skims over Freddie Mercury’s HIV diagnosis. Sometimes it is to simplify, as in the case of The Theory of Everything, where important details were removed in order to minimise the running time. Sometimes though, as in the case of Green Book, a biopic becomes a ‘symphony of lies’ (to quote the sister of Don Shirley, the biopic’s protagonist) which becomes so fictionalised you wonder why they didn’t just write, well, fiction.
The truth is that, as formulaic, conventional and safe as biopics may be, they are often box office hits, even if not necessarily beloved ones. Bohemian Rhapsody made $910 million on a $55 million budget, not because people love the film, but because people love Queen. A biopic can feel like little more than a Wikipedia page, a cinematic CV of cradle-to-grave greatest hits, and still make a decent amount of money, because audiences crave familiarity. Studios know all too well that one of the only reliable ways to lure viewers out of their living rooms and away from their Netflix accounts is to tap into intellectual property that the public already has a vested interest in. This is why we have so many remakes, so many franchises, so many adaptations of books and video games, so many prequels and sequels, and now, so many biopics. It’s high time that audiences, and the film industry as a whole, moved on.
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