I just read yet another review of Ridley Scott's Napoleon, and it made me wonder yet again about biopics. They are always "based on," which is a nice way of saying that they routinely lie about whoever's life they're selling. I gather that Napoleon is especially egregious on this front.
But why? Popular biographies in book form don't do this and are still big sellers. Why do movies have to do it?
I'm not talking about the need to create dialog where no record exists. As long as it tries to stay faithful to what's known, that's fine. I'm not even talking about compressing real events. A two-hour movie has limits on how long a scene can run.
But what's the point of putting people where they never were? Or having things happen at the wrong place and time? Or deliberately inventing dialog that was never even remotely said? Or making supporting characters into people they never were? Or inventing motivations that never existed?
Is it really impossible to make an entertaining biopic that's 99% faithful to the truth? Maybe it is. It's not like I've ever tried. But I still wonder.
Kubrick wanted to film a movie on Napoleon. I wonder how that would have come out. There are times when movies and TV depict historical events I knew nothing about. For instance, I knew nothing of the Tulsa Race Massacre before I saw it on Watchmen.
I was recently listening to one of my favorite movie soundtracks, The Bounty (Vangelis). I think that movie pretty much accurately depicted the actual event, certainly more so than any previous film.
About five years ago, the script and Kubrick's notes were published as a book. Based on that, it would have been a grinding slog that his reputation is better for never having made. What he did make using that research was Barry Lyndon, which gives you a good sense of what he was trying to accomplish, only with a more compact and coherent story.
I liked Barry Lyndon a lot. One of the most beautifully shot films. Perhaps his version of Napoleon would have been a worse movie. Since you apparently have read the script, how would you rate it for historical accuracy?
To be honest, I wasn't reading it to judge its historical accuracy, but to try and imagine what sort of film it would have been. Nothing stands out in my memory as having been especially egregious, but that was also before I had read a couple of biographies of Napoleon that really boosted my knowledge about him. Knowing the liberties that Kubrick took (to put it mildly) with his material, I'm sure it had its share of tweaks and exaggerations.
“Is it really impossible to make an entertaining biopic that's 99% faithful to the truth?”
Yes, it is, because at some point the people who are making it are going to find themselves at cross purposes. Cramming historical events into a coherent story that fits into a 2-3 hour movie production is essentially impossible, especially when the scope is expanded to encompass a long period of time. Scott's movie covers nearly 30 years of Napoleon's life, and it does so surprisingly effectively (I saw it last night), but to do so Scott and David Scarpa tweak events and timelines to make something more narratively appealing. The problem really comes when people finish the movie thinking that they've "seen" history, which the movie is definitely not. What it is is entertaining hokum, and Scott doesn't seem to be representing it as anything other than that. Only now people are going to believe that Napoleon abandoned the Egyptian campaign because he was being cuckolded and that he personally led a cavalry charge during the battle of Waterloo, because it was more entertaining to portray it that way.
The following YouTube criticism about two movies regarding Steve Jobs explains this very well. “Jobs” (film 2013) is considered factual yet is considered crap while “Steve Jobs” (film 2015) takes great liberties in dialogue and timelines yet is considered a great movie with a greater truth. Andy Herzfeld (an early key employee at Apple) says about “Steve Jobs“ none of is happened, but it’s all true”. Wozniak read the script and stated that he felt that he was actually watching Steve Jobs even though it was fiction. Conversely, “Jobs” gives no insight or understanding of the man.
https://youtu.be/mZruIWXB59s?t=1
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The following YouTube criticism, about two movies regarding Steve Jobs, answers your question very well. “Jobs” (film 2013) is considered factual yet is considered crap while “Steve Jobs” (film 2015) takes great liberties in dialogue and timelines yet is considered a great movie with a greater truth. Andy Herzfeld (an early key employee at Apple) says about “Steve Jobs“ none of is happened, but it’s all true”. Wozniak read the script and stated that he felt that he was actually watching Steve Jobs even though it was fiction. Conversely, “Jobs” gives no insight or understanding of the man.
https://youtu.be/mZruIWXB59s?t=1
There's a genre of British historical movies, that always seem to me to be excellent and inspire me to look up the topic --only to discover immediately the movie has grossly misrepresented the main character or wildly exaggerated a single element to create an easy and cheap parable. I am never able to watch the movie again after that however much I might have liked it at first.
Two that come to mind are The Libertine, about the poet John Wilmot, where he is styled as a sort of ur-Sadean personality, but when you read about him it's quickly obvious he had Tourette's syndrome and that's the real story.
And The Imitation Game, where the complexity of unravelling the Enigma device is reduced to one misunderstood eccentric and his magic gizmo and who then commits suicide, where in real life there was a lot more to it than that and he died in a lab accident.
In each case there is so much more to the real history that could have been explored in a way that could have been really interesting and informative experience but they've tossed it all away for a pandering and smug moral puppet show that seems offensive and trite by contrast to the lives they've bastardized.
One of the reasons I prefer straight fictions is the incessant whining about historical innacuracy in films like this. If you want a documentary, go watch one. Quit whining, who cares.
I am reminded of the release of Thirteen Days, when people were all in a tizzy over Kevin Costner's character Ken O'Donnell being places where historically he wasn't. The filmmakers moved the story through Ken, and that required putting him in the room where key things happened. If that decision is a sin, it's a venal one; and it served to drive a compelling movie that gets the important stuff right.
Costner's accent in Thirteen Days, on the other hand, should go in the same Hall of Shame as Dick Van Dyke's accent in Mary Poppins.
No complaints about Robin Hood?
Maybe Costner deserves his own floor in that museum.
I'd say it is obviously impossible for the reason you said. You're trying to compress 60 years of a very eventful life into an hour and a half. If you don't merge event and combine characters, you'd have far too much going on with far too many people for the audience to keep it straight. Saying that books can do that in 1000 pages isn't a legitimate comparison.
People need to just admit that if you want to do a semi-creditable biography, you need to do it as a miniseries on TV, not as a movie.
Motion pictures typically go through a long development process. You don't just buy a script and film it as written. It may go through multiple rewrites based on different people's views of to make the film best appeal to the audience. Then the director will normally rewrite some more before filming. During the shoot and editing, more stuff will likely be changed. An initial cut will be shown to test audiences, and based on the reaction, more changes may be made. By the time the film is released, it may be quite different from the original script.
All large budget films, including biopics, go through some variant of this process, because people believe that it increases the odds of producing a financially successful film. Even if you start with a script that's scrupulously faithful to actual history, the movie you get at the end of the process likely won't be. And since whoever writes the initial script knows that, there's not much incentive to make even the original script try to adhere closely to the historical facts.
I could certainly see both compressing the number of characters into a manageable cast, and using individuals to represent memes.
E.g. if some ambassador attended some important meeting, I could see a movie deciding to not introduce the ambassador character but having some other character attend the meeting. Just to simplify the story line.
I’d be pleased if a documentary were 99% faithful to the truth. Film just isn’t a medium well suited to marrying historical accuracy with entertainment. But it can help bring focus to one or more aspects of a man’s life, however simplified or exaggerated. I only ask that a film leave me better informed after I leave than before I entered. Napoleon failed rather miserably in that regard, at least for me.
By pure chance, I recently read Robert’s biography of the man: A Life. Facts were perhaps a little too fresh, but what I really wanted was emotion. Ideally, I wanted the film to bring to life one of history’s most forceful personalities. Phoenix was godawful in that regard. Scott was more interested in the relationship with Josephine. Fair enough. But I never felt much emotional truth there, even when I could pick out the various historical bits driving the plot.
All in all, I think the casual viewer will walk out of the film with a far worse idea of the man and the period. The coronation scene is a keeper, at least for those wishing for more than David’s sumptuous painting can deliver. And I felt like Waterloo gave a taste of what fighting must have been like, although in minutes rather than hours and days. And if ever the subject of the siege of Toulon comes up, I guess that the scene in this film will serve as a decent image, no matter what inaccuracies it might portray. Oh, and the ‘whiff of grapeshot’ will stay with me. That’s about it.