Two movies this year, J.
Edgar and The Iron Lady,
represent everything wrong with biopics. And both contain a use of the most
awkward of framing devices; old people remembering their lives in the past.
From Water for Elephants to Chaplin to Little Big Man (hell, even a League
of Our Own pads its runtime with this plot machination), it's an easy
shortcut for the anti-voiceover crowd. "See? It's not voiceover, it's a
person talking about their life to a third-party or their own hallucinations,
totally different!"
At first, it seems necessary, utilizing an audience
surrogate (usually a young naive man or a biographer - see Anthony Hopkins in Chaplin as the writer-surrogate
character) to over-explain to the audience who everyone is and what's going on
(see also: J. Edgar's "The first
lady..." "You mean Mrs. Roosevelt?" line for how stupid it
thinks its audience is). The audience surrogate (who is also the filmmaker
surrogate, allowing the writer-director to voice all the possible character
criticisms through dialogue in awkward 'please explain yourself, sir'
pseudo-conversations).
This framing device is usually done under the guise of ‘I’m
dictating my memoirs’ or ‘I’m testifying in open court’ as a way of tying
together fragments of memory. For a while, it works, as we seesaw between time
periods and the not-voiceover guides us along the gentle storytelling current.
But it becomes this tortured, strained, creaky contraption, wheezing as it
shifts back and forth in time, becoming more unnecessarily complicated as it
attempts to simplify what began as a very simple story. By the end, the film
collapses under the weight of its own pretensions and gimmicks, becoming a
chore to sit through instead of just an enjoyable piece of biopic fluff.
And at the end of the day, all you're left with are good
actors buried under bad old-age makeup, which, despite using many of the best
makeup artists in town, always makes the actors resemble James Woods in Mississippi Burning (or worse, Billy
Crystal in old-age makeup - see also Mr.
Saturday Night, The Princess Bride, The 2012 Oscars, etc). They become musty,
dusty, decomposing half-melted-wax sculptures/mausoleum figurines, all while
they wax nostalgic with folksy recitations of their history in their trademark
'old-person voices.' So yeah, the actors get to have their over-the-top dramatic fun
with age-spotted makeup and wispy-haired bald-caps (latex-assisted acting that
I like to call ‘histrionics in prosthetics’), embracing all the joys of
‘playing old’ (which, for actors, is a joy akin to ‘playing ugly’ or ‘playing
asshole’ or ‘playing retarded’) but what about the audience? Why should we
care?
Does anyone want to see these parts? Are they interesting?
Did anyone say, 'I don't want to see Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in the
80's, when all the interesting stuff happens, I want to see her in the present
day, old and decrepit and babbling near-incoherently to her dead husband and
looking like Julia Sweeney's Dame Sarah Kensington on Saturday Night Live's Theatre Stories (endless scenes which constitute the first 20
minutes and last 10 minutes of a 110 minute movie). Does anyone want to see
Robert Downey Jr. or Leonardo DiCaprio fat and bald and wrinkled like a young
Benjamin Button, stumbling and mumbling around like the grandfathers of
vaudeville, instead of more scenes with them young and energetic and,
oh-I-don't-know, actually doing stuff that interesting and important instead of
the modern day scenes which are usually just them in bad makeup, sitting around
and thinking to themselves?
Note to filmmakers; we know what voiceover is. We like it. We
accept it.
The Shawshank Redemption didn't need a scene at the
beginning and the end of Morgan Freeman in bad old-age makeup on a park bench,
'Lemme tell ya a story there, young fella,' because...we've seen movies before.
Neither did Goodfellas. Main
characters talk directly to the audience all the time. This is allowed. Just
use voiceover. It serves the same purpose as the framing devices but it cuts
out 20-30 minutes of boring useless scenes and refocuses the story tighter.
You're already cramming an entire life into 100-150 minutes. Don't waste time
that you don't have with extraneous monologues to fictional characters. Just
let the main character be the narrator, reliable or unreliable, without pretext.
Let them tell their story and let the viewer decide what to believe. This
half-assed workaround is a contrivance (and worse, always a fictional one at
that).
Not that most of these movies would be great films if you
just cut out all the old-person-makeup-framing-devices but...they would have
been more watchable and bearable.
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