An Invention without a Future. James Naremore
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Darin’s talent, which was doomed from the start because of a childhood illness; unfortunately, though, it feels more like a vanity project in celebration of Spacey’s talent for mimicry.
Biopics in general are crucially dependent upon a dialectical interaction between mimicry and realistic acting, an interaction that can become threatened when a major star undertakes an impersonation. In White Hunter Black Heart (1990), one of Clint Eastwood’s most underrated films, Eastwood plays a character based on John Huston and in the process accurately imitates Huston’s slow, courtly manner of speaking. Good as the imitation is, it has a slightly disconcerting or comic effect, if only because it’s performed by an iconic star in the classic mold; any basic change in such an actor’s voice and persona seems bizarre, almost as if he had donned a strange wig or a false nose. Probably for this reason, some of the most effective impersonations in recent films have been accomplished by actors who are not stars in the classic sense. Meryl Streep, for example, has performed a variety of characters and accents, so that when she impersonates the celebrity chef Julia Child in Julie and Julia (2009) there is no great dissonance caused by a difference between star persona and role.
Like Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman possesses a particular kind of stardom that is based on his work as an actor, not on his sex appeal or public personality. One of the high points of his career is his impersonation of Truman Capote in Capote (2005), which won several awards and was widely praised by people who had known Capote intimately. We can see the actor behind the mask of Capote, but the actor doesn’t have a consistent behavioral image that generates conflict with the mask. The impersonation, moreover, is never slavish, so nuanced and emotionally convincing that the display of imitative skill never causes a rift in the suspension of disbelief. Hoffman’s achievement is all the more impressive because Capote was an ostentatiously eccentric figure, the kind of personality that might seem comically grotesque. An effective self-publicist who relished celebrity and society gossip, he was far better known than most writers in America; people who never read his books saw him often on television, especially as a guest on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, but it was difficult to say whether the mass audience viewed him more as a witty TV conversationalist or as a freak. Short and chubby, with a round face resembling a dissipated child, he spoke in a high-pitched, nasal, quite effeminate voice that was marked by a whining Southern drawl, and he gestured with broad, limp-wristed movements. In the period when he became famous, few if any media personalities were so obviously and theatrically gay.
Very soon after Capote was released, the actor Toby Jones played Capote in Infamous (2006), which, like the Hoffman film, deals with the events surrounding the writing of Capote’s In Cold Blood, a so-called “nonfiction novel” about the murder of a Kansas farm family and the capture and execution of the two killers. Even though Jones seems to have the advantage of a greater natural resemblance to the diminutive Capote, his performance is much less interesting than Hoffman’s. In contrast to Jones, Hoffman’s neck and chin are relatively strong and his physique sturdy; he’s also a bit too tall for the role, although the film compensates for this problem by the way it frames and photographs him in relation to the other actors. At the technical level of impersonation, he adopts Capote’s hairstyle and effeminate gestures, together with appropriate costumes such as the luxurious scarf and floor-length topcoat we see him wearing in the Kansas scenes. He stands as Capote did, with back slightly arched and belly thrust forward, and is especially good at duplicating the Capote voice and accent, which he masters to such a degree that he uses it effectively even in the softly spoken, intimate moments. (His costar Catherine Keener, who plays Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, has far less need to impersonate because Lee was notoriously shy and reclusive, and thus lacked a celebrity image.) Beyond all this mimicry, however, Hoffman’s portrayal is noteworthy for its naturalness and psychological nuance, which are worthy of the best Stanislavskian acting. In fact, his impersonation is wedded to a subtle psychological idea about the character. Largely through silent reaction shots, he enables us to see Capote’s mingled voyeuristic curiosity and fear over the murders; his growing attraction to one of the killers; and his cunning manipulation of the Kansas community, the two condemned men, and the publishers of his book. As Robert Sklar has pointed out in his review of Capote, the contradictions and complexities of the character are also shaped and shaded by Hoffman’s appropriation of typical Capote mannerisms: “In an early scene, Hoffman/Capote points his chin in the air, a movement signaling at once vanity and vulnerability. The actor conveys Capote’s conviction that his inner demons can be controlled by regarding the ‘self’ as a constant performance. It’s a life strategy that the film Capote puts to the test, and finds ruinously wanting” (57).
Capote and Infamous are examples of a subgenre that Thomas Doherty terms the “textual biopic,” in which “a foregrounded artwork becomes background to a portrait of the artist during the process of creation” (4). The textual biopic isn’t new (see Charlton Heston as Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel in The Agony and the Ecstasy [1965]), but recent years have produced a cycle of such films, all dealing with celebrities of the modern media. A signal characteristic of the pictures in the cycle is that the audience’s knowledge of and in most cases admiration for the “background” artwork functions as ironic counterpoint to a more or less antiheroic depiction of the artist’s psychological and professional conflicts. Cases in point are two films about Alfred Hitchcock that appeared in 2013: HBO’s The Girl, directed by Julian Jarrold, which concerns the making of The Birds and Marnie; and Fox Searchlight’s Hitchcock, directed by Sacha Gervasi, which tells the story of the making of Psycho. Doherty observes that the filmmakers “traffic not only in reenactments [i.e., imitations] of scenes from their host films,” but also “play an audiovisual mind game” involving intertextual references. The danger of this strategy is that Hitchcock fans might reject the reenactments as weak imitations; but even when the films succeed at the level of imitation, Doherty remarks, they “can only be pilot fish swimming in the wake of their great white sharks, a lesser order of Hitchcockian entertainment” (4).
The Girl and Hitchcock have a somewhat distracting effect because knowledgeable viewers are constantly in the position of judging how well the actors imitate their models. The Girl, derived from Donald Spoto’s gossipy book Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies (2009), centers on Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren, played by Toby Jones and Sienna Miller. Although Miller is an emotionally subtle and talented actor, for that very reason she lacks Hedren’s brittle, almost affectless quality, which Hitchcock used so well to convey repression in both The Birds and Marnie. Jones does an excellent job of mimicking the Master of Suspense’s accent, but he plays the character as nothing more than a sour, sadistic user and abuser of women, lacking even a trace of the on-screen charm and humor that made Hitchcock a popular personality. The situation is different in Hitchcock, based in part on Stephen Rebello’s The Making of Psycho, which gives us a likable Hitchcock. Unfortunately, Anthony Hopkins, who plays the famous director, sounds too much like Anthony Hopkins and is smothered by an all-too-visible rubber face. Ageless beauty Helen Mirren doesn’t remotely resemble Alma Reville (a woman unknown to the general public). Scarlett Johansson is appropriately bosomy as Janet Leigh but too voluptuously soft and rounded, lacking the somewhat birdlike figure and the mixed attitude of toughness and vulnerability we see in Leigh’s Marion Crane. James D’Arcy, who plays Anthony Perkins, is the most effective mimic in the cast but has the thankless job of walking in the footsteps of one of the iconic performances in screen history.
To my mind, a more effective example of impersonation in a textual biopic is Simon Curtis’s My Week with Marilyn (2011), which concerns the making of Laurence Olivier’s The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), starring Olivier and Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn has been impersonated on stage, film, and TV more than any other movie star, and nearly as much as any historical personage. A partial list of women who have played her (omitting celebrities such as Lindsay Lohan and Madonna, who have posed as her in magazine photos or music videos) includes Melody Anderson, Susan Griffiths, Catherine Hicks, Ashley Judd, Blake Lively, Barbara Loden, Sophie Monk, Poppy Montgomery, Barbara Niven, Misty Rowe, Mira Sorvino, Charlotte Sullivan, and Sunny Thompson. To this list we can add the more recent performances of Megan Hilty, Katharine McPhee, and Uma Thurman, who’ve played actresses competing for the role of Marilyn in a fictitious Broadway musical on NBC-TV’s Smash. But Michelle Williams, who stars in My