What kind of accuracy do you expect from movies based on real people or events?
Maybe a better question might be: What kind of accuracy do you want? And are you willing to swallow a few falsehoods in the name of good entertainment?
Unlike documentaries, narrative features based on true-life stories tend to occupy this nebulous middle ground between fiction and nonfiction, where details and timelines become collapsed or murky. Side characters or entire moments are created out of whole cloth for the sake of story expediency.
For me, good biopics are shaped around facts rather than fudges. As a journalist, that’s something I think about all the time when I approach my own work: That it’s not only possible but vital to tell true stories in interesting and compelling ways, inconvenient details and all.
The rules aren’t the same when it comes to telling a cohesive story on screen, requiring different skills and nuanced decisions. Film is — and should be — an artistic expression. I want filmmakers to have the space to be creative and stray from the record to underscore certain ideas or themes.
I just don’t want to feel lied to by a movie.
Golden Globe winner “Bohemian Rhapsody” has been criticized for this, and I think with good reason.
I won’t list all the discrepancies here; you can find numerous stories online that go into detail. But let’s talk about key elements from the film that depart from reality. One aspect in “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which is about the band Queen and its charismatic frontman Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek), is the timing of Mercury’s HIV diagnosis.
Writing about movies for a living means thinking about what kinds of stories they tell, so I rang up Kevin Fallon, the senior entertainment reporter for The Daily Beast.
“I understand when you’re distilling a person’s life into a two-hour movie, there’s going to be the need to play with things a little bit in order to have a narrative chug along,” he said. “But what this movie does is falsify things in a way to manipulate an audience into a reaction and I find that gross.”
“Bohemian Rhapsody” moves up Mercury’s diagnosis by two years to 1985, which means the moment lands with an added intensity “to make it seem like it was the impetus for that performance of his career at Live Aid,” is how Fallon put it. “They changed the facts for purely dramatic reasons — to manipulate an emotional reaction from the audience — but that just wasn’t what happened. I think that it’s a very crass thing to do to Freddie Mercury’s legacy and the AIDS movement, honestly.”
That matters. Even if you think the movie is a good time and you love Malek’s performance.
Much as I may want filmmakers to stick with the facts, I can find holes in my own argument. 1965’s “The Sound of Music” contains elements large and small that don’t sync up with the real von Trapp family story, including fundamental personality changes to the two leads. And yet the movie works. I wasn’t sure to how reconcile this until Fallon pointed out something.
“‘The Sound of Music’ is a musical fantasy, above all else, let alone a truthful depiction of people and events,” he said. “It doesn’t purport to be a film of record.”
That’s a distinction worth pondering.
Because “Bohemian Rhapsody” does purport to be film a of record “to the point where ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ meticulously re-creates that Live Aid sequence, shot-for-shot,” Fallon said, “which is telegraphing to audiences that it is realistic, that it is based on fact — that what you’re watching actually happened.
These are subtle cues that tell an audience if a movie is a larger-than-life creative gambit or something closer to realism. But it also matters how the filmmakers themselves talk about their work.
“There’s no perfect answer to the question of accuracy,” Fallon said. “I think it’s a case-by-case basis. But in the end there generally is some responsibility to the truth — at least the spirit of it.”
Here’s to more accuracy when it counts.
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