UNDERSTANDING SCREENWRITING: Biopics and Definitely Not A Biopic

Felicia and...

Maestro (2023. Written by Bradley Cooper & Josh Singer. 129 minutes)

Biographical films, or biopics as they are commonly known in the business, are very tricky films to make. You can never cover a person’s complete life, even if you are doing a television miniseries. The best approach of dealing with a famous person is to make a film about what made them famous. Lawrence of Arabia (1962) only deals with the few years during World War I when T.E. Lawrence is leading the Arab Revolt into Damascus. Patton (1970) only deals with the last three years of his life during World War II. Gandhi (1982) only deals with his efforts to drive the British out of India.

An approach that can work almost as well is to focus on a small but vivid period of time. Robert Sherwood’s 1939 play and the 1940 film Abe Lincoln in Illinois tries that approach, but it wanders into a variety of scenes and does not hold together, while Lamar Trotti’s script for the 1939 film Young Mr. Lincoln is a much better focused look at the same period.

So what do Lawrence, Patton, Gandhi, and Lincoln have to do with Maestro? The new film is a biopic about conductor, composer, and educator Leonard Bernstein. It is written by Bradley Cooper, who also produces, directs, and plays Lenny, and Josh Singer, also an executive producer and who has written for The West Wing and the films The Fifth Estate (2013), Spotlight (2015, for which he and Tom McCarthy won an Academy Award), and The Post (2017). So we are not talking amateurs here, and it shows.

The writers have decided to cover a lot of Lenny’s life, but their approach is closer to Young Mr. Lincoln than Abe Lincoln in Illinois. The Sherwood screenplay shows its stage origins with long, talky scenes that probably played better on stage than on the screen. Cooper and Singer do give us some long dialogue scenes, but they are more compelling than anything in the Sherwood play. One of the best is an argument between Lenny and his wife Felicia done in one take with the two of them in front of a large picture window outside of which the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade goes by. Lots of dialogue, but with great actors delivering it and the parade making the scene cinematic.

The film gets off to a very fast start, telling us to pay attention. The first scene is a 25-year-old Lenny getting a phone call at 9:30 in the morning telling him that Bruno Walter is too ill to conduct the day’s concert and since Lenny is the assistant conductor, he will have to conduct the concert. With no rehearsal. We see Lenny run through a variety of sets, get into Carnegie Hall, and then the writers do not show us the concert, which made Lennie a star, but afterwards when the administrators of the New York Philharmonic are going on in front of the audience about what a genius this young man is.

So now we pay attention to Lenny and his friends in the New York artistic world of the early forties. Just when those scenes seem about to take us off the rails, Lenny meets Felicia Montealegre, a struggling actress. The writers give us time to meet Felicia, see the attraction between the two, and believe it when they get married.

The crucial decision that Cooper and Singer have made is to structure the script primarily about the relationship between Lenny and Felicia. The writers have dropped or minimized a lot of Lenny’s activities. You will probably wish, as I did, that there was more about his working on the stage musical West Side Story, but it merely gets mentioned in passing by Felicia that Lenny is working on a musical version of Romeo and Juliet with Jerome Robbins, the choreographer and director, with a book by Arthur Laurents, and “a brilliant young lyricist named Stephen Sondheim.” Since nobody knew who Sondheim was at the time, it would have been funnier if Felicia had said, “and a young lyricist whose name I can never remember.” You can see why nobody ever lets me anywhere near the making of real movies.

We know from the opening scene when the phone rings that Lenny also likes men, and this provides a dramatic line throughout the film. Felicia is not happy about it, but assumes it is part of the deal of being with Lenny. At one point Felicia tells Lenny that their oldest daughter Jamie has heard the rumors about Lennie. Felicia tells him he must not tell her. This sets up a terrific scene where Lenny lies through his teeth to Jamie, telling her that people have always been jealous of him, which is undoubtedly true, although Lenny may be exaggerating some of the details, and that any rumors she may hear probably come from that jealousy.

The film begins to drag a bit in the last 45 minutes when Felicia gets sick with cancer and dies. I am not sure you need all that suffering, but it gives Carey Mulligan, who is spectacular all the way through, some nice scenery to chew. Bradley Cooper has been gracious enough to give Mulligan top billing in the cast list. I guess he thought that since his name was on the picture as writer, director, and producer, he could give her the top slot in the cast list.

Two other interesting names show up in the list of twelve producers: Martin Scorsese and Steve Spielberg. According to one account, Spielberg was going to direct the film, but saw some of the footage Cooper had directed for A Star is Born (2018) and turned Maestro over to him. Smart move, Steve. Nice to have supportive friends.

Josephine and…

Napoleon (2023. Written by David Scarpa. 158 minutes)

There is something in the air again. Here we have two big films about famous men and their wives. Maestro mostly works; Napoleon mostly doesn’t (at least in this version; its director Ridley Scott is threatening us with a four-hour version available for streaming later).

Napoleon Bonaparte is a character who attracted film directors for years. Hmm, perhaps because he led large groups of men into action, just like directors do. Part of the problem for filmmakers is that there is so much material in Napoleon’s life. Abel Gance, the great French filmmaker of the silent area, started out to make a six-film series covering all of Nappy’s life. He could only get the money to make one film, which in its 1980 restoration runs 5 and a half hours. (Various other versions over the decades have run a variety of lengths.) Nappy also shows up in the film and television versions of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. My favorite Napoleon is Herbert Lom in the 1956 version of War and...

Several years ago the Los Angeles County Museum of Art had an exhibition on Stanley Kubrick done in association with the Kubrick estate. One of the items was a large card catalogue cabinet filled with cards for books and articles on Napoleon Kubrick had collected. Just looking at the card catalogue you could understand why Kubrick could never get a film out of it.

Ridley Scott tries to have it both ways. As a director, he is drawn to the military battles, since he is known to like spectacular scenes. The first one in the film is the best. A young Napoleon figures out a way to get the British and Spanish fleets out of the French port of Toulon. He attacks the fort, then uses the fort as a place from which to bombard the British and Spanish ships. The scene is striking because it is different from the land battles that we see at Austerlitz and Waterloo.

Scott and his writer, David Scarpa, are, like the writers of Maestro, trying to use Napoleon’s marriage to Josephine as the thread to hang the other scenes on. Unlike Felicia in Maestro, Josephine is not around when Nappy is fighting the battles. She disappears for long periods of time.

The scenes that we do get between Nappy and Jo are the best written in the film. While Scarpa and especially Scott think that we will be happy to go off to war, the more intimate scenes are more interesting. The problem with the intimate scenes is Joaquin Phoenix is not as compelling as he should be. Napoleon here (and in movies where he is a supporting character---see Herbert Lom in the ’56 War and Peace) should grab us by the throat and never let go. Phoenix does not have the star power or what we used to call in the Navy the command presence to hold us, let alone lead an army.

The Nappy and Jo scenes work in the film as well as they do because Vanessa Kirby is compelling on screen in ways that Phoenix is not. We can read a variety of feelings in her eyes. Look at the scene where the couple, in presence of several witnesses, has to admit their marriage is over and sign the divorce papers. You cannot take your eyes off Kirby, even when Phoenix is talking.

The secondary characters are not particularly well written or played, with the exception of the Duke of Wellington, played with great relish by Rupert Everett. He is given some great Duke of Wellington’s lines. I especially liked the one where he tells a sharpshooter not to shoot Napoleon and why. Scarpa (and Scott) have fudged history a bit here by having Nappy and the Duke meet after the battle. They never met in real life, but who could resist setting up such a scene?

The history generally gets rushed. Tolstoy and the filmmakers of the various versions of War and Peace use the battle of Borodino as the big set piece, but this film only mentions it in passing, indicating the number of dead in a title. I do not know if Scott’s longer version will include more of the history.

Because the thread tying the film together is the Nappy-Jo relationship, the fact that she dies before Waterloo makes the final battle scene anti-climactic. Once Jo dies, the movie is over for us.

About a Person, But Not a Biopic.

Poor Things (2023. Screenplay by Tony McNamara, based on the novel Poor Things by Alasdair Gray. 141 minutes)

The script and the acting are fabulous. We’ll get to the problem stuff later.

An attractive woman in a plush dress jumps for a bridge. Her body is found and taken to the laboratory of Dr. Godwin Baxter. It takes a little while into the film before we find out what happened in the lab. What we have been watching in the meantime is an odd creature in the form of a young woman who looks like the woman who jumped. Her physical skills are that of a young child, and her language skills are equally awkward. Any actress with half a brain would jump at the part this early in the script.

We finally get an explanation. Dr. Baxter, or God as some people call him, has removed the brain of the fetus in the dead woman and put it into the head of the corpse of the woman. He then re-animates the woman, whom he now calls Bella, and watches her develop.

Do you get a hint or more than a hint that one of the books or movies that influenced this was about Frankenstein and his monster? You are right, but here it is played for sci-fi comedy more than horror. And all the better for that. It is a much fresher take on the material than we have seen since, well, Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974).

God has a young assistant Max, whom he has hired to take notes on everything Bella says and does. Needless to say, Max falls in love with Bella, as whacky as she is. Bella, however, runs off with Duncan Wedderburn, a gambler and all-round ne’r-do-well. Who turns out to be perfect for her; he wants to debauch her and she is perfectly willing to be debauched because she has as great a desire to learn about the world as she does about sex. (This is not a movie you should take your children anywhere near…unless they wish to be debauched as well.)

While on a ship, Duncan wins a pile of money at gambling, but while he is asleep Bella, who has been shown extreme poverty on shore, gives the money to two ship’s crewmen and asks them to give it to the poor. You know they are not going to be so generous.

Bella and Duncan end up in Paris, where Bella decides to go into business as a whore as a way to make money and learn more about life. Here is where I have one of two complaints about the script. It works in the old cliché that women will really only learn about life by becoming prostitutes. We have been hearing that crap for hundreds of years if not more. In McNamara’s favor, he plays most of those scenes for laughs, as if he cannot take it entirely seriously himself.

Bella returns to God’s house as he is dying. Max is still there, still in love with Bella, but working with God on another version of Bella, this one called Felicity.

You would think you could end the story there, but who shows up but the General, who was married to the woman who jumped off the bridge. He wants his wife back and we get more scenes than we need (my second complaint with the script) before we get to a happy ending.

So much for the script, now for the acting. Emma Stone is astonishing as Bella, very precise in her physical movements and verbal twitches. She handles the changes in Bella beautifully so we believe this girl would grow up to be this woman. You think that is easy in screen acting when nothing is filmed in chronological order? Willem Dafoe, complete with bizarre facial makeup, makes a great God. He manages to walk the fine line between serious and comic, which is essential for the role. I have not seen everything Mark Ruffalo has done, but his comic timing as Duncan was surprising. The great German actress, Hanna Schygulla, shows up as an old lady on the ship and nearly steals the film. The “new Bella,” Felicity, is played by Margaret Qualley, and we see the connections, but also the differences, with Bella. And the rest of the cast is equally good.

So what’s the problem with the movie? It is longer than it needs to be, but that is true of every movie released in the awards groveling season. The situation here is that it is, as The New Yorker said years ago about another film, “inhumanly overproduced.” The sets and costumes are overdone, and the CGI work on the locations is so rich you just get tired of watching them. Those excesses take us away from the story, the characters, and the acting. That the acting holds us as much as it does is the actors’ final triumph over the production.