Ray Pride

Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. -"Twelfth Night," Shakespeare

And others, long dead, have an Oliver Stone movie made about them, keeping all the second-rate wigmakers of northern African in expense money. (Colin Farrell seems lost in "Alexander" for the general affability he radiates, not quite embodying the sort of megalomaniac who wakes up in the morning, touches himself and smiles, "Oh! I'm still Oliver Stone!")

Be not afraid of greatness, but be afraid of movies made about great men by successful directors who've found creatures of industry to finance their fascinations. Thanksgiving is the time for turkey, and Christmas, especially with the telescoped awards season begun last year when the Academy Awards were moved forward a month, has become a time of stuffed goose: movies that would not exist without a director with a "vision," an actor with fire in the belly, and a script about a powerful historical figure with peculiar flaws and, in most cases, a very rich man whose career began in another field who wants greatness to rub off. Hollywood's latter-day version of Greek drama seems to be the tableau of a talented director, or veteran journeyman, erecting, then demolishing, the great man who's obsessed them for years. But who's behind the artistes with the fixation on inventing their own version of the great man? Men with millions or billions who want to associate with the great men who love the great men.

The genre of the biopic, for these reasons, seems increasingly fertile--this year's output includes "Alexander," "The Motorcycle Diaries," "Kinsey," "Finding Neverland," "The Sea Inside," "Beyond the Sea," and next year, perhaps, Renee Zellweger's Janis Joplin and Joaquin Phoenix's Johnny Cash. Are they more than a hall of mirrors of what professional narcissists hold great in others, while reflecting mostly themselves?

With "Ray," Jamie Foxx has the proverbial role of a lifetime, a performance inhabiting Ray Charles' rebellious imagination all the way down to the fingertips. Taylor Hackford says he wanted to make the movie for sixteen years, telling CNN "the story of Ray Charles is the world underestimating him." (This, from the director whose last movie was the terminally sluggish "Proof of Life.") How did it finally get made? According to Agence France-Presse, thanks to a single investor: a Ray Charles fan from Colorado who coughed up $35 million. For all but a handful of men, it could be the direst of disaster, or the first in a succession of immense bankruptcies.

Kevin Spacey's wanted to bodysnatch singer Bobby Darin for years, despite now being substantially older than Darin, dead at 37, with Spacey, at 45, putting up a chunk of his own money and shooting much of the movie in Germany in order to take advantage of money from a local producer.

It would be cynical to say that Martin Scorsese wanted to make "Kundun" so that his own worldly work might shine brighter in association with the Dalai Lama, but "The Aviator" presents a more intriguing case study. Working from a script prepared by director Michael Mann with screenwriter John Logan (he of the very fictional making-of-"Citizen Kane" HBO movie, "RKO 281") for Leonardo DiCaprio (with whom Mann had also failed to produce a James Dean biography), Martin Scorsese takes on the legend of Howard Hughes. Hughes, a man whose mania led him to famously assert that he wanted to be the best flyer, the best golfer, the best lover, the best filmmaker ever.

The thrilling opening of "The Aviator" is rife with the love of filmmaking, as Scorsese & Co. depict the making of Hughes' own "Heaven's Gate," the World War I aerial epic, "Hell's Angels" (1930). Scorsese's love of cinema past is reflected mostly in the movie's muddy-colored palette, aping early versions of Technicolor's bloom. But as the movie foreshadows Hughes' eventual decline into obsessive-compulsive isolation, you wonder who the movie is for, beyond its makers? That is, beyond overseas producer Initial Entertainment Group (also on hand for "Ali" and "Gangs of New York"), or Germany's Intermedia Films, hoping to conquer the known world of distribution by ponying up a huge chunk of "Alexander"'s likely unknowable budget.

It's a recipe for reflecting what's on screen, paranoia mingling dangerously with megalomania, or Psych 101 invocations of the Oedipus conflict, killing two daddies with one stone--the big guy on screen and Daddy Warbucks back in the production office. With vanity in play, the projects might be less tidy than a well-made bit of fiction, more largesse than finesse.

And speaking of big guys and the biggest of biopics, of course, we've got "The Passion of the Christ," which, for convoluted reasons, could not be called "The Passion," director-producer-financier Mel Gibson's preferred title for his keening, slashing portrait of his savior, a bloodier vision of his own self-image in movies where he howls at the edge of sanity and hope, as in the first "Lethal Weapon."

Plus, all sorts of snotty surmises have been made about "Fahrenheit 9/11," Michael Moore's anti-hagiography of George W. Bush and his family's murky timeline, spearheaded by Miramax big Harvey Weinstein, a major rumbler himself as well as Democratic supporter and contributor, who would not be shy about taking the scalp of a sitting president. (Miramax's own 2004 biopic, the prissy "Finding Neverland" is a mid-budget feat of production and costume design rather than an illumination of why a grown man might want to always remain a boy.)

Compare all these to some of the year's best fiction, a film like Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor's "Sideways," an adaptation of a novel but with a beating melancholy heart about hope that can last beyond the first defeats of middle age; Clint Eastwood's flinty "Million Dollar Baby" (written by Paul Haggis), an astonishing, and astonishingly spare miniature about love and regret, one of the best movies by the 74-year-old director; or Joshua Marston's "Maria Full of Grace," where emotional authenticity resides alongside scrupulous research; of Pedro Almodovar's post-noir puzzle-box, "Bad Education," which nests levels and levels of his own blurred biography with a dozen other personal fixations. Movies about life, and lives lived, transformed by art, perspective, by the use of camera, music, the notion of personal (rather than collective) memory, and by simple imagination. (Even Eastwood had to resort to an angel when Warners balked, with an investment by Chicago's own well-heeled Tom Rosenberg ("The Hurricane," "The Gift").

The biopic is a rickety thing, a feat of contraction, kind of a cheat, filled with dramatic truncations and psychological reductionism. ("Come here Watson! I need you!") Ray Charles or Howard Hughes or Bobby Darin or Alexander-the-not-so-Great: these are lives well lived but for dramatic purposes, too true to be good. And if we know the figure, the actors, no matter how gifted ("And the Oscar goes to... Jamie Foxx")--are playing games with the subjective memories of sentimental viewers. (Cate Blanchett's Katherine Hepburn in "The Aviator" is glorious, likely because she's giddily playing an actress whose manner starts at caricature and barks upward from there.)

An actor wants to be that man's man. And a man with money to burn wants that budget's reflected light to flame across a thousand or three screens and then upon the Kodak Theatre stage come February 27. All hail the campfire of the vanities!

(2004-12-14)

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