His-Story, Her-Story, and all the Stories in Between: the Best Biopics

Article by Amy Calladine. Edited by Hannah Probert. Additional Research by Ellie Veryard.

One of the surest bets for Oscar success in 2011 is The King’s Speech. Based on the friendship between a reluctant King George VI and his unconventional speech therapist Lionel Logue, the film offers a very personal take on British life in the late 1930s. Suffering with a debilitating stammer, we follow George (or Bertie as he was affectionately known) on a quest towards recovery and self-empowerment.

After I had left the cinema, it suddenly hit me that I had witnessed a creative retelling of one of the most iconic and familiar periods of British history. The climax of the story is the King’s seminal radio broadcast announcing the dawning of global war in 1939. Images of families huddled around a crackling wireless are etched on national memory, but through our emotional investment in Bertie’s life story, the instance is cause for celebration not despair.

With the language of emotion and personal empathy then, The King’s Speech reminded me that the smaller stories of human life are just as important as the big, proverbial narratives of change. Put simply, there are thousands, millions, of personal histories which make up the whole and which can be easily forgotten in our focus on the grand narrative.

The biopic can be used as an effective and responsible entrance point into the past. In stark contrast to whiggish narratives of ‘great men’, the best films about real people are effective tools in the democratisation of historical knowledge, recreating the cultural texture of past societies through the dramatisation of human life.

All film versions of history are vulnerable to accusations of inaccuracy for dramatic effect. Still, we should not judge cinema by the officious depiction of learned ‘fact’, but in its power and ability to make the past feel present, if only for a couple of hours.

So, with thanks to The King’s Speech for whetting my filmic appetite, here are three of my personal top picks. It is perhaps surprising, considering my penchant for early modern history, that all of these films are set in the twentieth century. I’m also aware that I’ve left off some remarkable classics like Ghandi and Schindler’s List with no particular motivation. All I can say is that these are the films which have struck a particular chord in me, opening up a fresh pathway into a past through the language of reciprocal humanity.

Walk the Line (2005)

Ok, I’ll admit it, I’m a bit biased with this one. Walk the Line is one of my favourite films of all time about one of my musical heroes Johnny Cash. I’ve watched it over and over again, and I’m always confronted with something new to think about. The life story of the man in black is beautifully portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix, who appears to have taken extensive lessons from Stanislavski’s school of method acting. So completely does Phoenix embody Cash’s journey from self-destruction to ultimate redemption that you occasionally have to remind yourself you aren’t watching a documentary.

As well as being a great portrait of rock n’ roll America, the film has a dark, destructive underbelly as childhood tragedy

turns into drug addiction and family breakdown. Ultimately though, the final message is one of triumph. The redemptive

power of love, honesty and music hits you hard, and alongside a blinding soundtrack, paints an original and intelligent

picture of one man’s struggle to live the life he was made for in the U.S of A.

La Vie en Rose (2007)

And now for another musical legend, this time it’s the turn of one of France’s most famous exports: Edith Piaf.

In this gritty rags-to-riches story, the rise and fall of an icon is tackled with panache and passion. Marion Cotillard, with the help of a consummate team of make-up artists, plays the adult Piaf right up to her death from liver cancer in 1963.

One of the most striking decisions made in the filmmaking process was to allow for a non-linear chronology. Flicking backwards and forwards between significant events in the personal history of the ‘little sparrow’, the film is suffused with an affecting air of retrospection. An unconventional childhood ferried from guardian to guardian, living for some time in a Normandy brothel and later with a travelling circus, we see a poverty-stricken Piaf singing the Marseillaise on the streets of Paris. Discovered years later in Montmartre by nightclub owner Louis Leplée, it’s not long before the legendary chanteuse is catapulted into the limelight.

One of the most remarkable things about this film is its sense of tragic inevitability. Like Cash, Piaf’s is a complicated character to portray on screen. There are some lovely bits of period detail – glittering parties at the height of fame and dizzy lunch dates in 1930s New York. Still, La Vie en Rose really succeeds in its depiction of the underside of fame and fortune, and the exceptional path of human life throughout some of the most turbulent years in the history of modern Europe.

Milk (2006)

Finally, we head over to San Francisco’s Castro district in the 1970s for this memorable depiction of the life and death of Harvey Milk, human rights activist and the first openly gay man to hold political office. This film is a bit different to the other biopics in both content and process. Milk was not born into fame. He wasn’t steeped in royalty or lauded for his musical genius; in fact, it wasn’t until the age of forty that he decided to embark upon a career in politics. His passionate commitment to this lifestyle change feels like a spiritual awakening as we are reminded that it is never too late to transform yourself or your world.

Sean Penn is spellbinding in the eponymous role, and Josh Brolin positively chilling as Milk’s tormented assassinator, Senator Dan White. The America evoked here is one teetering on the brink of radical change. Set against a stifling climate of inequality and injustice, the battle for a brighter future becomes all the more inspiring.

The film buzzes with the energy of genuine commitment to the importance of Milk’s story. Working closely with the original campaign team, and featuring several individuals playing themselves, this is cinema with a conscience. DVD extras include interviews with those who knew Harvey, as well as the massive reconstruction of a candlelit march through the San Fran streets.

I came into the film knowing very little about the tragic and inspirational life of Harvey Milk. By the time it had ended, I felt I had learnt something important about a slice of American history which I may have otherwise missed.

To sum up, we shouldn’t be afraid to tell the stories of the past, both recent and distant, through the lens of individual life. In watching even the most historically inaccurate movie (Braveheart, I’m thinking of you) we are reminded that the people living before today were just that – people.

Injecting a bit of life back into history can be no bad thing. When it’s done right, the biopic has the potential to go further than a written study ever could. The four films above all made me feel something real about the person depicted and showed me a different perspective on events. To put it simply, they succeeded in making me care. Bertie, Johnny, Edith and Harvey – four exceptional cases, true, but more importantly, four enlightening opportunities to view the past through eyes other than my own.

*****

Review of the King’s Speech by Philip French, The Observer, 9 January 2011.

The film is the private story of a famous public man, King George VI (known in his family circle as Bertie), the woman who loved him and became his queen, and the innovative Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue, who helped him control and come to terms with the stammer that had tortured him since childhood. The social and political background, [is] acutely observed and carefully woven into the film’s fabric.

Empire Magazine Review of James Mangold’s Walk the Line compared with Taylor Hackford’s Ray, released eleven months earlier.

Where Hackford’s film was an overblown, emotional blockbuster precision-engineered for Oscar- (rather than box-office) glory, Mangold’s movie is a more composed affair, studiously focused on a slow-burning romance rather than straining to capture an entire life. As such, Walk The Line feels like a more rounded work; it may lack some of Ray’s pizzazz — heroin is a better villain than prescription speed — but it moves more smoothly and eventually arrives at a natural stopping place

Review of La Vie En Rose by Cosmo Landesman, The Times, June 2007.

La Vie En Rose is a film that pays great attention to period detail and getting the look and sounds of the time just.

Review of Milk by Philip French, The Observer 25 January 2009

What we then see is the course of the gay revolution in San Francisco through the career of Milk. Shot in a grainy fashion, it’s often difficult to distinguish between new footage and archive material... Milk is warm, emotional, politically committed.

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