A recent trend in movies is to take well-publicized and often times well documented and photographed moments in history and recreate them on the big screen. The first time I saw it was with Man on the Moon, that biopic about Andy Kaufman starring Jim Carrey. But Good Night and Good Luck, the recent play Frost/Nixon and The Queen are also examples of the kind of appropriation that takes video footage and, well, has actors imitate them, word for word, and hollow gesture for hollow gesture. Help me. I just don't get it.
It seems to me if you're going to do a movie about real events, especially ones that have occurred quite recently, then you better have some new insight or information or interpretation to offer your audience. Perhaps there are some offstage machinations that cast the historical moment in an entirely different light or a recent revelation that somehow upends our understanding of an important figure. But those aren't the movies we usually see (except for this one, which is incredible and the perfect example of how to handle material that's been previously televised) Instead, all of the above flicks take documented moments and simply have their actors mimic the real event...which begs the question: why not just go and watch the real event? When it comes to the antics of Kaufman, or the Frost/Nixon interviews, or Edward Murrow's grilling of McCarthy, these incredible parts of our history are available to us, in the flesh, most likely on YouTube if not Netflix. So why do we give Oscars and kudos to what is necessarily a poor impersonation? In the case of Good Night and Good Luck there wasn't even much of a movie to watch, nearly the entire film was a series of word for word reenactments of what actually happened. It was like watching the World Trade Center version of the Twin Towers coming down, computer generated approximations and all, when you could just go on CNN's website and see the real thing. Even worse is the recent translation of a very good documentary called The Staircase into a television show. Now we're taking TV reality entertainment and fictionalizing it...for TV. Are screenwriters, producers and studios so bereft of creative ideas that they're starting to devour themselves like the proverbial snake? What's next, a movie about American Idol with Al Pacino playing Simon Cowell? Can't we just watch American Idol? Does anyone in the world think that Frank Langhella or Helen Mirren or Jim Carrey can even roughly approximate the drama that only real life can and, in this case, actually does offer for our video hungry eyes? Can somebody tell Al Pacino to stop yelling?
4 comments:
Grizzeer,
Why do you Blog about filmic approximations of original events? Why recast concepts in two dimensional symbols to simulate the original concept. Why read "Simulation and Simulacra" when you can squat on a sit'n-spin and rejoice in the blooming buzzing phenomena all around you?
'Preservation of history through the myriad arts' is a part of our culture. When Pacino barks his last "hooo-ahhh," we will not only have his recorded audio and video; we will have artists recreating his essence through all the arts.
I look forward to seeing paintings like Munch's "The Scream" with an abstract Pacino as it's subject. Is that unoriginal? Perhaps music slang will adopt the term "to place Pacino on the note" instead of using the typical nomenclature, "sforzando."
Not everyone gets to experience the original copy.
Weren't you a fan of "United 93," and, hell, documentaries in general?
At one level, pop will eat itself; but, at another, pop helps nurture the sacred. Just ask Bob Dobbs.
Yeah, United 93 was great...precisely because there was no video documentation of what happened on the plane for the movie to imitate. True, there were some audio clips that survived from cell phones and some radio transmissions from the terrorists, but there wasn't any footage of what happened. Thus the movie actually revealed something new about that day.
My post is about actors explicitly trying to exactly imitate everything about an event that was filmed when it ocurred, right down to, say, nixon wiping his upper lip right after saying "I'm not a crook". that's not art, or story-telling, or even narrative, it's just wal-mart.
Settle down.
I’ll jump in…
What bothers me about some (not all) of the movies/shows you mentioned Chris is that it just feels masturbatory; necessary for artistic growth, but do we need to watch it? Many artists, specifically actors, like to do imitations and spend time analyzing one character in depth. It's often fun to do such a study on someone that is well documented through film. But it’s an actor’s workshop, an exercise, not a complete work of art!
THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING on Broadway was a great example--it was Vanessa Redgrave, pretending to be Joan Didion, essentially doing a stage reading of her book. I loved the book, and it was a great stage reading, but was better suited to an acting class than a Broadway stage. Unlike what Chris mentioned of United 93, the production added nothing to what we already knew from the book. I’ve heard some people say that they’d be happy to hear Vanessa Redgrave reading out of a phone book, but I don’t think that needs a Broadway spotlight. No matter how accurately she pronounces all the names.
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