Assignment 7: Art Imitates Life
Posted by Austin Cinephile
Every week, we will be posting a prompt related to cinephilia, and some of our founding members will contribute a short response. Hopefully you, our dear readers, will feel compelled to respond in our comment section as well. This week’s prompt was:
Write about your favorite performance by an actor portraying a real life character
Oftentimes, film actors are so convincingly real that they become the icon for an existing historical figure for future generations. This kind of representation actually happens more often than common sense should allow. How many of us imagine Cleopatra to look like Liz Taylor? Or Claudette Colbert? History comes alive through the cinema in a way that no other art form can make it.
This week, we study those performances that will forever define, comment upon, or critique the real-life subjects, thus addressing and changing history in the process.
Stephen: Tom Hulce as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – AMADEUS
The biopic has acquired a reputation for stuffiness, and with good reason. Many biopics have left this viewer cold, particularly those that strain to accurately recreate the events of someone’s life just as they happened. However, the biopics that take chances with historical fact, that overlook the whole truth in favor of originality and intellectual exploration, have provided us with many memorable films.
One of my absolute favorites of the genre is Milos Forman’s Amadeus, which features a remarkable performance from F. Murray Abraham as the envious Salieri, who picks a fight with God himself after recognizing in the younger Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart the kind of talent he had prayed for but never received. Abraham’s Salieri, as the “patron saint of mediocrity,” provides the aforementioned intellectual exploration, serving as a depiction of what it must be like to have the ability to truly appreciate and analyze art without being able to create it yourself.
For originality, though, the prize goes to Tom Hulce’s portrayal of the wunderkind Mozart. This character, a strange and joyous creation, was written by Peter Shaffer for the stage in 1979, which is notable because it predates the rebel teen movies of the 1980s, films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High and much of the John Hughes oeuvre. Hulce’s Mozart is basically an 18th century version of the characters featured in these films; the legendary composer is here re-imagined as an immature, depraved youth, chasing skirt and farting in the presence of noblemen. There is not really a historical precedent for this behavior. I find it interesting that, of the many rumored possibilities for his young death at the age of 35, none of them are syphilis.
As I said, many biopics have collapsed under the weight of their own seriousness, but Hulce ensures that this fate never befalls Amadeus. The screen really does seem to brighten whenever he wanders into the frame, his notoriously impish laugh grating the ears while simultaneously spreading infectious giggles among viewers. Double entendres and other sexual innuendos abound every time he opens his mouth to speak, and where other biopic musicians like Jamie Foxx’s Ray Charles and Joaquin Phoenix’s Johnny Cash turn dour and morose after falling into a spiral of drugs and drink, Hulce has fun with his booze, crashing parties and mocking authority under the influence.
This brings me back to what is the most intriguing element of this film. Its main focus falls on a callow youth’s reckless disregard of an experienced elder, and the film favors the youth. Here is a musical prodigy, thrust into the spotlight at an early age by an opportunistic father, who lacks the maturity to handle the burden of celebrity, which existed long before Britney and Lindsay began offering free peep shows.
Mozart’s undeniable talent imbues him with the kind of self-confidence that leads young and talented artists to make more enemies than friends and act as if they are invincible. This is not the kind of dynamic you’d expect from a period biopic, but thanks to Hulce’s note-perfect performance, we have this one-of-a-kind masterpiece. Also thanks to Mozart’s own music, which plays throughout the film. That never hurts.
Steph: Brad Pitt as Jesse James – THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD
I like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford because it is not a biopic. Biopics are boring. They either attempt to tell an entire life, in which case they are entirely predictable because the sorts of lives that get turned into biopics are all the same, or they attempt to tell a portion of a life, in which case they are even more predictable, because the film that results can follow standard narrative conventions even more closely.
Biopics are also very much about the pleasure of watching two famous identities interact (as when Jamie Foxx played Ray Charles), or about watching a star attempt to physically transform into someone we know he or she is not (like Meryl Streep as Julia Child). We feel pleasure when we recognize the actor in spite of their performance, at knowing better than the movie, at not being fooled. We feel the pleasure of indulging in the performance itself, of being reminded how much we love the real Julia Child, and we feel pleasure at our ability to discern how well Meryl has become her. Finally, we feel pleasure because biopics make us feel that we have gotten to know someone (perhaps better than people who really knew the person), and, unlike a fictional film, this person and their story are real.
I like The Assassination of Jesse James because it is not interested in any of that. While Casey Affleck’s assassin, Robert Ford, is both a twitchy, nervous, doe-eyed revelation and the film’s protagonist, we cannot take our eyes off of Brad Pitt’s Jesse James, and the film knows it. When the narrator tells an audience that eats, sleeps, and breathes celebrity that “Rooms seemed hotter when he was in them. Rains fell straighter. Clocks slowed. Sounds were amplified,” he could just as easily be describing Pitt himself. Watching both Jesse and Pitt alternately revel in and reject this celebrity is what makes this performance so fantastic.
Pitt’s Jesse is neither hero, anti-hero, or villain. He is cruel, capricious, and can’t hold his liquor. We see Pitt as a father who picks up his daughter and whirls her around until she loses a shoe. This is the Pitt we know, the very public father of a tribe of children, and the Jesse we want as our hero.
In the widely-praised train robbery sequence, when Pitt pulls his black kerchief over his nose and looks into the darkness toward the coming train (and directly into the camera), he is terrifying. We’re not used to Pitt as a villain, but perhaps we’ll buy it since he’s so convincing. But Pitt’s Jesse is a more complex beast.
Sitting in his backyard, seen in reverse-shot after the narrator recounts Jesse’s older brother spurning Jesse as “peculiar and temperamental,” Pitt is childlike, the picture of innocence. Is this our villain?
A child’s wooden swing hangs from a tree next to Jesse, and as Pitt smokes a cigar and wraps two snakes around his arm, he tells Affleck, “I give them names.” “Such as?” Affleck asks. “Such as enemies,” Pitt replies, his gaze entranced by the snakes. “I give them names of enemies,” he repeats. He uses a small knife to cut off their heads, and says his wife will fry them in butter and garlic. Is this our hero?
Still later, Jesse beats a young boy to tears, then stands weeping into his horse’s neck and is so overcome with shame he cannot sit straight in the saddle. The camera is close on Pitt’s rage during the beating, but we see only the back of his head as he cries. The entire scene is uncomfortable to watch. We are shown too much of what we don’t want (Pitt’s savage abuse of the boy) and not nearly enough of what we do want (Pitt’s tears). However, we are also torn between our desire not to see Jesse James crying such shameful tears and our desire to be reassured that Jesse is actually a good man who does not deserve the assassination the film’s title has promised us.
This uneasiness is the core of the film, and the willingness with which Pitt embraces it is this performance’s greatest strength. While Pitt’s handsomeness is undiminished despite age and facial hair and a dark dye job, his blue eyes have never seemed as cold or as sad as they do in this film. He quietly embodies all of Jesse James’s contradictions and never once lets us make our minds up about the man.
Michael: David Cross as Allen Ginsberg – I’M NOT THERE
Todd Haynes’ imaginative Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There gave us some of the best performances of 2007. Though none of the characters were actually named after the famed folk singer, each incarnation depicts a different aspect of Dylan’s persona. From his anachronistic early-year embodiment Woody, played brilliantly by the young, yet old-souled Marcus Carl Franklin, to the Hollywood personification Robbie, played by the late Heath Ledger, I’m Not There is a potpourri of daring casting and solid performances. If you think you know where I’m going with my selection, you might want to bite your tongue for just a moment.
Cate Blanchett, the most interesting casting choice and the film’s second best performance behind Franklin, did a spectacular job as the drug bender/Don’t Look Back/electric-era Jude. But, like the 2008 Academy Awards where she was robbed of another Best Supporting Actress Oscar, her weighty performance will again go un-awarded in this post. For, my selection is, in fact, David Cross as the American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg.
Cross’s Ginsberg first appears in the film while ridding tandem on a golf cart puttering alongside Jude’s limousine. The limo’s passengers notice the wind-whipped writer, first questioning then confirming: It’s Allen Ginsberg! Viewers are hit by a similar realization upon recognizing: It’s David Cross! Cross morphs into Ginsberg with the simple addition of a full, glue-on beard with matching frizzy hair extensions. He doesn’t even need to change his glasses, and the transformation is complete. Then, in his brief yet highly enjoyable few scenes, Cross channels his inner bard to berate a statue of Jesus with Jude, stun the egotistical rocker with his own celebrity, and recite poetry in psychedelic montage, all in true Ginsberg fashion.
Daniel: Jim Carrey as Andy Kaufman – MAN ON THE MOON
I think there has never been a more defining and career-changing bio-role than Jim Carrey in his stunning performance as comedian Andy Kauffman in Milos Forman’s 1999 film Man on the Moon. Carrey IS Kaufman in this movie for me (at that time, when I saw the film in the cinema, I had never even heard of Andy Kaufman) and for audiences everywhere.
Up until this point, Carrey had been America’s slapstick king with films like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, Dumb & Dumber, and Liar, Liar. Although he did appear in the more serious The Truman Show the year prior, his career was still mostly a wasteland of funny faces and constipation noises.
With this bio-pic, however, Carrey took on the daunting and serious task of recreating the life of one of the most bizarre and enigmatic figures in American culture. A comedian who got kicked off Saturday Night Live, who thought comedy was wrestling women and throwing toilet paper at poor people, and who had an alter-ego lounge singer of the highest schmaltz-order, Kaufman is not an easy person to understand. Yet Carrey captures the madness, the hilarity, and the idiosyncrasies spot-on.
More importantly, however, Carrey’s turn as Kaufman suddenly made Jim Carrey’s career make sense. Oh, we all collectively thought, this bizarre comedian has been pulling a prank on us for over a decade. He isn’t some idiot savant of facial contortions; he is a crazy person who is doing subversive art through re-inventing the halfwit.
Seeing the depth with which he was able to construct Andy Kaufman (his hero and apparent predecessor) allowed us all to see that Jim Carrey was a talented and highly intelligent actor/comedian who, like Kaufman, didn’t care if and why his audience was laughing as long as he was having fun.
A great bio-pic tells us just as much about the performer as it does about the subject, and here we found that balance perfectly.
Oh, bonus: Here’s a recently released clip of Carrey’s audition tape for the movie:
