Death to the myopic biopic
Inspired by ALINE, here are 10 off-beat looks at real people
We need to talk about Aline.
If you’re not familiar with this new release, let me get you up to speed. Aline is not not a Céline Dion biopic. Filmmaker Valérie Lemercier crafts something of a big-budget fanfic to the French-Canadian icon in the guise of a story about global popstar Aline Dieu.
Lemercier also casts herself in the role of Aline … from cradle to present-day. Yes, that means Lemercier plays Aline as a literal five-year-old. Imagine The Irishman’s de-aging technology on recreational drugs, and you get something like the bizarre experience of watching Aline.
Pull quotes from the marketing include blurbs from major outlets touting Aline as “transcendent,” “masterpiece,” and that it “must be seen to be believed.” Those aren’t technically inaccurate, but they refer to the general “WTF?!” sensation of letting the film’s bonkers conceit wash over you. It’s not so much a recommendation of Aline the film so much as it’s a recommendation of the experience of watching it.
I turned my screener-viewing experience into a DIY “rowdy” screening in my own apartment, and I do strongly suggest watching Aline in some kind of environment where the wine can flow and your screams can carry. I’m not going to tell you Aline is a great movie because, well, it’s not. But I am going to tell you that if you value cinematic experiences that make your jaw drop and have the ability to make you feel emotions strongly — even if that’s just staring agape in puzzled wonder — then witness Aline. (As of publication, it’s only available to watch in theaters, but I’m sure a VOD release is close.)
There was a period of watching Aline where I briefly contemplated that Lemercier was genuinely onto something quietly revolutionary within the film. As she toggles between ages without visibly aging (Aline looks largely similar from roughly her twenties to her fifties), the film assumes an almost cubist quality as it flattens time into a meaningless concept to understand the musician. Without seeing her visibly age, it unmoors us from chronology and allows for some bold, baffling narrative choices.
But then the second half of Aline largely just falls off a cliff, and my justifications fell by the wayside. The film did get me thinking, though, about movies that dared to challenge the conventions of the biographical drama to greater results. Here are ten worth your time.
Casting JonBenet, Netflix
In many ways, Kitty Green made something of an anti-biopic Casting JonBenet. This documentary seeks to understand the psychological scars left in the hometown of JonBenet Ramsey by casting a fake biopic about her life in Boulder, Colorado. The film stitches together audition material with the townspeople trying to understand the various players in JonBenet’s story, along with some “scenes” from a movie that is and was never to be. The result is something that blows up the biopic from the inside out, showing both the possibilities and limitations of art to process real trauma.
Charlie Says, Netflix
The best Charles Manson biopic released to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Helter Skelter killing was not, in fact, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. It was Charlie Says, from the mind of Mary Harron. Perhaps the title of Harron’s most famous film, American Psycho, would apply here. She’s fascinated by the mechanisms of control exerted by charismatic leaders like Manson, though Matt Smith’s interpretation of the notorious killer is scarcely present on-screen. He doesn’t need to be for us to understand the power he exerts over the women he draws into “The Family.” His physical absence underscores the iron grip he held over his followers as observed by a graduate researcher trying to break his spell over his incarcerated acolytes.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Pluto TV (free with ads)
Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is less the portrait of one man as it is a visually inventive tribute to the indomitable power of the human will. We rarely see Mathieu Amalric’s Jean-Dominic Bauby in the film’s main timeline as he tries to communicate from a hospital bed using his one functional body part: an eye. The film locks us into his subjectivity as we understand the world from his perspective, at first struggling to make sense of our surroundings and slowly realizing the beauty all around us. Though a movie about “locked-in syndrome” might sound like a depressing slog, it’s actually a buoyant and beautiful hymn to the sensations that make life worth living.
Experimenter, rental
Michael Almereyda goes to war with the biopic in Experimenter, his look at the life of social psychologist Stanley Milgram. The film openly flouts stodgy genre conventions, having Peter Sarsgaard’s cinematic interpretation of the famed researcher address the audience directly and deconstruct events occurring before our eyes. It’s a bold conceit to go fully anti-biopic, but it works for a man whose famed experiments blurred the lines between reality and representation. Almereyda’s film gets as ontological as Milgram himself did, providing a challenging and satisfying adaptation of form to subject.
A Hidden Life, rental
At what point does a man no longer become a man when he commits himself to an ideal? That’s the question Terrence Malick ponders in A Hidden Life, a major and masterful accomplishment from the legendary director that somehow generated little fanfare upon its release in 2019. Yes, the nearly three-hour runtime is imposing. But the story of Franz Jägerstätter, a humble Austrian man whose conscientious objection to fighting for the Nazis gradually assumes greater proportions, is a staggering thing to behold. Malick lets us sit with the subject in quiet, modest moments and ponder our own philosophical commitments as we walk the journey with him. At every step of the way, he subverts expectations of the classical “Great Man” framing. Jägerstätter is extraordinary precisely because he remains so ordinary.
I’m Not There, Pluto TV (free with ads)
Todd Haynes set the gold standard for the subversive biopic in I’m Not There, his cinematic sketchbook grasping for the impossible: a cohesive theory of Bob Dylan. The film acknowledges the impossibility of knowing Dylan the person, so it attempts to understand him by treating each of his personas like its own person. This means “splitting” the singer-songwriter into six distinct characters played by different actors. It’s a fractured yet full experience of Dylan through orchestrating the dissonant chords into a strange symphony of his contradictions and paradoxes.
Jackie, Tubi TV (free with ads)
It seems that enough biopics are taking a page from Jackie’s limited time frame structure (beyond Spencer, also from director Pablo Larraín) that its narrative conceit may no longer seem novel. Nonetheless, it’s still exhilarating to experience Jackie Kennedy as incarnated by Natalie Portman while she navigates the crucible of her husband’s assassination. The film provides a unique insight into a woman so dissatisfied with the idea of being a mere mortal that she took an active hand in her own mythmaking. Jackie pulls back the curtain and shows how her calculated maneuvering led history to print her legend rather than her reality.
Love & Mercy, HBO Max
“History doesn’t repeat itself,” said Mark Twain, “but it often rhymes.” Bill Pohlad finds that to be the case in the life of Beach Boys great Brian Wilson, as he shows in Love & Mercy. The film intertwines the travails a younger Wilson played by Paul Dano as he puts together the legendary album Pet Sounds and a middle-aged Wilson played by John Cusack who’s gripped by his mental illness thanks to an exploitative psychologist. The bifurcated narratives, one moving toward freedom in art and the other toward freedom in life, harmonize magnificently.
Marie Antoinette, rental
The French booed Sofia Coppola’s punk take on Marie Antoinette, which means she almost certainly struck a chord with her recontextualization of the notorious queen. By injecting contemporary sensibilities and music into the rococo settings, Coppola allows for a complicated incarnation of Marie Antoinette to emerge from the mothballed annals of history. Kirsten Dunst, the true Sofia Coppola whisperer, brings to life a woman who can be both a helpless victim of circumstance and a hapless dilettante. Time has turned Marie Antoinette into a character, but this film returns her to just being a human with all the complexities and foibles we all have … although most of us lack her palatial environs.
Topsy-Turvy, Criterion Channel
Posterity remembers Arthur Sullivan and W.S. Gilbert for their contributions to the format of comedic opera. It does not have room to acknowledge the artisans and craftspeople who brought their initial visions to life. Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy takes a look at the legendary Gilbert & Sullivan from the ground up, using his favored ensemble drama format to showcase just how many people it takes to make a theatrical production possible. The film provides a more nuanced look at what and who enables great art than works that simplify its creation into the brainchild of a single mastermind. Leigh’s film about two artistic collaborators is a fitting tribute to and showcase of collaboration itself.
WHAT I WATCHED
If by chance you are wondering what Cows & Cows & Cows is, I’ve got you. Promise you won’t regret these two minutes (and read the interview linked below to understand why I watched this):
WHAT I HEARD
When you have friends that do great and important work, you have to share! Leila Latif delves into the film scene of her native Sudan. My guess is that you, like me, probably know little about cinema from the continent of Africa. This episode not only makes me realize that I need to know more — I also want to know more.
WHAT I READ
I have yet to see either of his new movies to weigh in, but Slate’s Dana Stevens asks an interesting question: is Chris Pine our new Robert Redford?
WHAT I WROTE
For Slant Magazine, I had a blast interviewing the Daniels — the filmmaking unit comprised of Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert — about their masterful new film Everything Everywhere All At Once. If you care about big, imaginative movies having a future on the silver screen, I cannot stress how important it is to vote with your dollars and see this in a theater.
Subscribers also got my exegesis on an experience I had with Jake Gyllenhaal a few years ago:
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall