Cliched and formulaic- why biopics rarely work

Rami Malek's feeble depiction of Queen rock icon Freddie Mercury was part of a long procession of bad biopics.

Few of us, realistically, deserve a biopic. But what did the world's luminaries ever do to deserve so many bad ones? The genre is a musty tradition. Silent films started addressing such figures as Mary, Queen of Scots and Joan of Arc 120 years ago.

The Academy can rarely resist bestowing the best actor Oscar on the candidate playing a real man. This century Truman Capote, Idi Amin, Harvey Milk, George VI, Abraham Lincoln, Ron Woodroof, Stephen Hawking, Winston Churchill and Freddie Mercury have all taken gold. Mathematically, playing someone who actually lived (and died) is your best bet for an award.

It's no wonder actors are drawn to such roles. It's a highly visible way to show off your craft and gain kudos. But what's in it for audiences?

Last week, Ralph Fiennes' The White Crow, about Rudolf Nureyev, came at the tail end of a batch covering Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Colette, Dick Cheney, Laurel and Hardy, Marie Colvin, Shakespeare, and Mary, Queen of Scots (again).

It's a weary business for reviewers, let me tell you, to drum up some semblance of enthusiasm week after week, when we'd all much rather great fiction was being told. Few films have ever thrived, or thrilled, simply by getting their facts straight.

The archetypal bad biopic is easily parodied because it falls back on some blatant crutches. Cradle-to-grave cliches are hard to pull off other than in spoofs, but such films can't resist the humble beginnings of a Ray or a Freddie.

It's the imposing of a therapeutic arc on these lives that feels endlessly reductive, as if the crucial thing to note about John Forbes Nash (in A Beautiful Mind) was how mental illness helped his contributions to game theory.

These gimcrack insights can then be packaged to represent an all-purpose triumph of the human spirit, as the score washes us aloft. The worst examples try the hardest to make us relate, squelching down each story's specifics into a generic mush.

There are noble exceptions in this male-dominated field. Milk, Lincoln and Capote had wit, intellectual heft and three genuinely inspired performances — a whole other realm of merit from Rami Malek's feeble Mercury.

But those films picked their battles, in story terms. We got the last eight years of Harvey Milk's life, Lincoln's fight to pass the 13th Amendment, and Truman Capote's moral crisis in the writing of In Cold Blood.

By contrast, the average biopic is a dull, lethargic trudge down every single cobblestone of memory lane.