Giovanni Ribisi, left, plays Lee White and Tom Wilkinson plays U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson in Selma, Ava DuVernay’s historical biopic that has drawn criticism for depicting Mr. Johnson as an obstacle, not an ally, of the U.S. civil rights movement.
This month, cinema celebrates an uncomfortable anniversary. In February, 1915, Epoch Producing Co. released D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, a film held in high esteem for essentially revolutionizing the medium, with its pioneering camerawork, commingling of intimate melodrama and grand historical epic and innovative use of cinematic style.
It was also a blatantly racist, wildly controversial movie, owing to its depiction of black Americans (played by white actors in burnt-cork blackface makeup) as sexually bullying simpletons, and its corresponding depiction of the Ku Klux Klan as a valiant force restoring order to a chaotic, Reconstruction-era American South. Feting the centennial of Griffith's film is like raising a glass at a family reunion to the long-gone great-uncle known for straining Thanksgiving get-togethers with off-colour racist jokes. The Birth of a Nation stands as one of cinema's most problematic historical movies, its depiction of post-Civil War America tainted by the racialized anxieties and resentments of the early 20th century.
The movies' history of playing fast and loose (sometimes dangerously so) with the historical record runs as long as the history of the movies themselves. When it comes to historical epics, biopics or other fare marketed as being "inspired by true events," most filmgoers are willing to grant certain liberties. We suspend our disbelief when Nazi officers speak German-accented English in Second World War flicks. Nobody watching Spartacus wonders why the titular gladiator-revolutionary bears such a striking resemblance to Kirk Douglas. Yet with fussier matters of historical accuracy, we've become more critical. Just look at this year's Academy Awards.
The 2015 Oscar slate is dominated by historical movies and biopics. The best-picture category alone contains a historical drama (Selma), a historically inflected fantasy (The Grand Budapest Hotel) and three biopics (American Sniper, The Imitation Game, The Theory of Everything). Maybe four biopics, if you count Richard Linklater's quotidian epic Boyhood as capturing, at some meaningful level, the adolescence of a real boy (star Ellar Coltrane). The more generous may even count Birdman as being a sorta-biopic dramatizing star Michael Keaton's own late-career professional anxieties.
All of these films that are more directly "inspired by true events" have drawn criticism for taking certain narrative liberties with the source material. American Sniper made lethal Navy SEAL Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) look like a noble lug instead of a narcissistic, self-mythologizing thrill-seeker. The Imitation Game suggested that British code-breaker Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) protected a Soviet spy. Selma drew heat for depicting president Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) as an obstacle to the civil rights movement, instead of an ally. Even the odd man out in this pack of biographical (or pseudo-biographical) and historical (or pseudo-historical) "best of" crop, Damien Chazelle's improbably thrilling jazz-drumming movie, Whiplash, drew criticism for a repeated anecdote that allegedly misrepresents the relationship between real-life jazzmen Charlie Parker and Jo Jones.
Takedowns and fact-checks of cinema's narrative liberties – such as Richard Brody's "'Whiplash' Gets Jazz All Wrong" in The New Yorker, websites such as History vs. Hollywood, or The Guardian's recurring Reel History column, in which accredited historian Alex von Tunzelmann holds historical dramas up against the historical record – have become abundantly common. And awfully tedious. It's like cultural critics have copped the deadpan, no-nonsense seriousness of Dragnet's Joe Friday, scowling warily through movies muttering, "Just the facts, ma'am."
"The cinema," Alfred Hitchcock said, "is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake." Hollywood films – even the historical ones – are ultimately entertainment, not education. Even the most detailed, rigorous, accurate historical movies will necessarily condense, revise and elide the actual, factual historical record for the sake of narrative efficiency, or plain excitement. It may be telling that people seem to be getting their history from the movies, and not from history books, despite the reissuing of source material in glossy new paperback editions branded with "Now a Major Motion Picture." But that audiences mistake historical dramas for educational films isn't the fault of these motion pictures, or their makers.
Quite the contrary. Two of this year's best American films – Clint Eastwood's American Sniper and Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel – work so well precisely because of the liberties they take with the historical record. Bradley Cooper's emotionally clenched, solemnly patriotic Chris Kyle may not be the "real" Chris Kyle any more than the cartoonish interwar Europe of The Grand Budapest Hotel is meant to be a direct representation of the real deal. But when Budapest's narrator (Tom Wilkinson again) announces early on that the events in the film are entirely true, he's not lying. And neither is Eastwood for ostensibly fudging his depiction of Chris Kyle.
What both Sniper and Budapest drive at is a deeper psychological and cultural truth. By making Kyle seem noble and long-suffering, Sniper creates a more complex character, one through which troubling questions about the nature of warfare, patriotism and the spirit of the United States can be interrogated. How does a viewer react to a character that actually, earnestly, without guile or delusion, believes in the structuring, oft-repeated American myth of "God, country and family"? What does it mean for a country to praise its soldiers and sailors as hero-martyrs, while offering limited support to the vets agonizing through the emotional and physical fallout of their allegedly civilizing conquests abroad?
In a different register, Anderson's movie uses code and transposition (such as zig-zagging militia logos recalling the Nazi SS insignia) to sidestep a direct confrontation with the realities of between-the-wars Europe. What's great about Anderson and Eastwood's movies is how all the ideas they try to elide or repress bubble back to the surface anyhow. The 20th-century history of Western Europe is as overpoweringly unignorable as the United States's 21st-century history. By falsifying the facts, Eastwood and Anderson are both able to interrogate bigger issues of national mythologizing, collective remembrance and the pain of history itself.
In the 1995 collection Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, editor Mark Carnes states that historical films tend to say more about the era in which they're made than the era they depict. It was true of The Birth of a Nation, which spoke to the vile culture of early 20th-century racism and white supremacy. And it's true now, in the way that films such as American Sniper and The Grand Budapest Hotel use the facts – amending them, warping them, ignoring them entirely – to pose pressing questions of how we remember, or misremember, our own collective history and shared ideology. That these movies are "problematic" may be their greatest virtue, as they help us to confront the problems in our past, and our present.
Such sweepingly ambitious cinematic-historical projects may not be fastidiously beholden to the facts. But they're anything but a piece of cake.