Top 10 biopics
10. Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould
This is the most radical of all biopics. It does exactly what it promises, breaking the Canadian pianist's intense and troubled life into concentrated fragments. Reassembly is left to the viewer. When he began working on the screenplay with Don McKellar, the writer-director François Girard recognised the pitfalls of the genre. "There are many traps," he said. "The main temptation is to try to cram everything about a life into one film. What you need is a radical idea or angle; if you decide to show the whole journey and cover everything, you're condemning yourself to staying on the surface. Evocation, rather than being descriptive or exhaustive, is the key to unlocking a subject. Evoking a territory is easily preferable to trying to cover it all."
Girard's film, structured in homage to Bach's Goldberg Variations, which has 32 sections and was featured on Gould's debut album, is a lesson in the majesty of understatement and suggestion. Vignettes of Gould's life, individually slight but with an enormous cumulative power, are presented to the viewer without immediate context; our understanding of how they lock together happens only gradually. If you want a measure of exactly how unorthodox the picture is, try this: it's a biopic of a pianist in which we never see the subject touch the keys. The camera goes inside Gould's piano, and even shows an X-ray image of him playing, but the physical satisfaction of seeing him in full flow is withheld. "That's part of the genius of the film," observed the actor Colm Feore, who is fiercely compelling as Gould. "You see me fondle pianos, talk about them, I'm around them, I even prepare to play them—but I never actually do. The problem is that I've occasionally been invited to drop by and play a little something at the induction of a new syllabus at the [Toronto] Royal Conservatory. I feel like saying, 'Have you even seen the film?'"
It was for practical rather than artistic reasons that Girard kept performance off-screen: "I didn't want Colm to imitate Gould's playing style, and I didn't know how to show it, so I decided not to show it at all. How would you get, say, an actor today to play tennis on film like Rafael Nadal? You couldn't. My advice for anyone planning to tell Nadal's life story would be: Stay away from the tennis court." Ryan Gilbey
9. American Splendor
Paul Giamatti as Harvey Pekar and Hope Davis as Joyce Brabner in American Splendor. Photograph: Sportsphoto/Allstar/HBO
Paul Giamatti didn't get to be king of the sad sacks overnight. That sort of title takes years of toil and dedication, not to mention performances as lovingly detailed as the one he gives as the underground comic-book author Harvey Pekar. This is a key work in the actor's repertoire of sullen grumps, as well as one of the more adventurous biopics of recent years. Pekar wrote about his life of drudgery and disappointment working as a file clerk at the federal Department of Veterans Affairs in Cleveland, Ohio. His friend, the legendary Robert Crumb, rendered Pekar's stories through a grubby crosshatch of black lines that exaggerated only slightly the author's seething discontent with the world.
It's significant that the movie should have been directed by a pair of documentary-makers, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, since it hovers knowingly between fact and fiction, incorporating documentary footage and animation alongside dramatised passages from Pekar's life. These show him falling in love with Joyce Brabner (Hope Davis wearing Harry Potter specs), a comic-book author who became Pekar's third wife and wrote Our Cancer Year about his struggle with lymphoma.
American Splendor is one of those movies that knows it's a movie: the real-life subjects are occasionally seen on screen with the actors playing them, and no attempt is made to disguise the artificiality of some of the sets. The schism between the real Pekar and his fictional incarnation is highlighted when the author, played by Giamatti, appears on David Letterman's talk show, while at home Joyce watches the real archive footage of him on TV. Far from feeling gimmicky, this reflects and enhances the autobiographical tensions of Pekar's own work, and introduces extra levels of cool, wry analysis into a world that might otherwise be oppressively bleak. RG
8. Ivan the Terrible
Silent-age aesthetic … Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible. Photograph: Rex Features
Sergei Eisenstein's last completed film still looks like an astonishing anomaly when compared with the films that were coming out of the US and the UK in the mid-1940s. Though made with sound, the aesthetic is that of the silent age, with Eisenstein shooting in extreme close-up and using actors caked with make-up. The sets, too, recall The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, with scenes in shadowy throne rooms and chambers that, at times, seem to be simply dug into the walls. Given Eisenstein's past mastery of montage, however, the most extraordinary thing is how much he relies on his performers: there's a theatricality that brings to mind Powell and Pressburger's Tales of Hoffmann.
Perhaps the most important point to make about Ivan the Terrible is that it was made during wartime to Joseph Stalin's specifications. Eisenstein was sequestered in Kazakhstan and "commissioned" to make the film. The Russian dictator was an admirer of the 16th-century ruler, a tsar given to violent outbursts and whose nickname was coined for his 24-year reign of terror. The circumstances in which the work was filmed are almost manifest on screen: Eisenstein's film feels cut off from the outside world, and the story – a Shakespearean narrative of triumph at a cruel price – is racked with paranoia and intrigue, a roundelay of conspirators foregrounded against pageantry.
The second half, in which the tsar becomes clearly unhinged – even though Eisenstein portrays his reign of terror being undertaken somewhat reluctantly – ruffled feathers in Russia. Party leaders saw unflattering parallels with Stalin, and the film was suppressed until 1958, five year's after his death. This is reason alone to rate Ivan the Terrible as a biopic. Although it was conceived as hagiography, the truth of the story – as seen by Eisenstein, a cerebral and literate man who didn't share Stalin's admiration of Ivan – is still clear through the propaganda trappings. Damon Wise
7. The Elephant Man
Between fact and fiction … John Hurt as Joseph Merrick in The Elephant Man Photograph: Allstar/Brooksfilm
The deal for David Lynch's second film was done over a cheeseburger and malt at Bob's Big Boy diner in Burbank, California. Producer Mel Brooks had just seen Eraserhead and was intrigued by the young director, who walked in wearing a white, buttoned-up shirt and a leather jacket, looking, said Brooks, "just like Lindbergh when he flew over the Atlantic". It was to be a fruitful collaboration; Brooks put Lynch with screenwriters Christopher De Vore and Eric Bergren, and 18 months later they had a script for The Elephant Man, the story of Joseph Merrick, the Victorian freakshow exhibit.
At the time, the film seemed an extraordinary move for Lynch, but in hindsight it prefigures some of his later concerns. Shooting in black and white – a decision sanctioned by Young Frankenstein director Brooks, who feared Merrick's deformities would be "too grotesque" in colour – Lynch made great play of the industrial breakthroughs of the late 19th century, and the film's atmospheric depiction of sparking electricity and gaslight adds an almost steampunk counterpoint to the cobbled streets. This would mean nothing without compelling performances, however, and John Hurt's title act truly centres the film, navigating the period's harshness with a poignant soulfulness, even under several pounds of latex and prosthetics.
Hurt's performance brought an Oscar nomination, and though some claimed the film was overly sentimental, The Elephant Man proved not so untypical for Lynch, who added unashamedly romantic flourishes to later films such as Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. In many ways, though, The Elephant Man is the perfect companion piece to Eraserhead, with its nervousness about relationships and parenting. "It's [about] a great triumph of love – of love for one another, of humanity," said Brooks. "It's an amazing thing, to care for this unfortunate person and find the beauty in his soul." DW
6. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Locked in … Mathieu Amalric and Marie-Josée Croze in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Photograph: Focus/Everett/Rex Features
Jean-Dominique Bauby, known as "Jean-Do", was an editor of French Elle magazine who once mixed with the great, the glamorous and Lenny Kravitz. In 1995, he suffered a massive stroke. His face was frozen in an outraged grimace, the lower lip jutting out of a lopsided mouth: his septic right eye had to be sewn shut by doctors. Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a portrait of life with locked-in syndrome, might have been called My Left Eye, as that was the only part of him that wasn't paralysed. And, like Christy Brown's left foot, Jean-Do's flickering eyelid becomes the tool of his artistic release. A therapist introduces a system of communication based on blinking — one blink for yes, two for no. An assistant reels off the alphabet repeatedly while Jean-Do painstakingly constructs words, whole sentences and eventually an entire memoir (from which the film was adapted by Ronald Harwood, who wrote The Pianist).
Mathieu Amalric is hypnotic as Jean-Do. The nature of the film, and the medical condition it describes, deny him the ostentatious acting challenges that usually come with playing a physically disabled character, but that only makes his clinched, internalised performance all the more remarkable. One memorably upsetting scene shows the grizzled Max von Sydow as Jean-Do's father, blubbing down the phone at a son who can only blink in reply.
Cinema has always struggled to depict the creative process, so it's novel to see a literary life that can't be quantified in overflowing wastepaper baskets. Jean-Do does not have that luxury — he edits in his head. It is there that the film's most expressionistic passages take place. The hospital is on the coast in the Pas de Calais, and the visual metaphors have an aquatic flavour tenderly realised by the cinematographer Janusz Kamiński: shelves of ice crumble into the sea, and Jean-Do imagines himself suspended inside a diving bell deep in the ocean, or trapped in his wheelchair on a pier isolated from land by the tide. RG
5. I'm Not There
Postmodern … Cate Blanchett as the 60s Bob Dylan and David Cross as the poet Allen Ginsberg in I'm Not There. Photograph: Weinstein/LMK
Few contemporary directors do postmodern as well as Todd Haynes, who told the Karen Carpenter story with Barbie dolls (Superstar, 1987), made a film about 70s glam rock in the style of 70s glam rock (Velvet Goldmine, 1998) and imagined what a 50s Douglas Sirk melodrama would look like if the subtext were the actual text (Far From Heaven, 2002). But his Bob Dylan biopic, I'm Not There, took the principle to new heights, casting six actors as the musician, including a young African-American actor as the young Dylan and Cate Blanchett as his 60s speed-freak incarnation.
It sounds gimmicky on paper, but I'm Not There does perfectly distil the alacrity with which Dylan changed his image in the first 20 years of his fame. Marcus Carl Franklin plays him first, as the rootless heir to folk hero Woody Guthrie, then Christian Bale takes over as the singer of protest songs. Bale gives way to Blanchett, who, as "electric" Dylan, rejects his folk past with sarcasm and venom, before returning as the born-again Dylan of the late 70s. Richard Gere finally appears as the latter-day Dylan of the Never Ending Tour, a cowboy figure from Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid, while in the meantime Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw make appearances as manifestations of the rock star's artistic life.
Haynes's methodical attention to detail ensures that this biopic not only works as a truthful approximation of Dylan's real life, but also makes sense of the mass of contradictions Dylan embodies. It features a fantastic soundtrack, too, in which a wide variety of musicians illustrate the diversity of Dylan's back catalogue, from the urgent folk of When the Ship Comes In to the mournful lament of Goin' to Acapulco. That Dylan gave permission suggests he approved, but it's a measure of the film's accuracy that no one knows for sure whether the reclusive rocker has ever seen it. DW
4. Downfall
To humanise or not? ... Bruno Ganz as Hitler in Downfall. Photograph: Allstar Collection/EOS/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar
Even 60 years after the second world war the idea of allowing a German actor to play Adolf Hitler in a German movie was almost a taboo notion in a country that had managed a spectacular moral transformation in the six decades since. Most previous iterations of the little corporal had been essayed by British actors of high standing (Alec Guinness in The Last Ten Days of Hitler being the standout), and one imagines that few German actors were ready to take on a part that they might be identified with to the grave.
The makers of Downfall split the difference and cast German-speaking Swiss citizen Bruno Ganz (whose nationality meant he hadn't grown up asking what did daddy do in the war?), perhaps the greatest European actor of his generation, as the great monster of the 20th century. To humanise or not to humanise, that was the sticking point: Hitler was kind to his secretaries, loved his dog, Blondi, and always complimented the cook, but y'know … there was all that other stuff. The film-makers evidently thought that cutting the monstrousness, the screaming fits, the tirades against treacherous generals and the final desire for the immolation of the whole German people ("they have not proven worthy …"), with something graspably, recognisably human would make for a more approachable moviegoing experience.
They weren't wrong, and they had the actor to make it work. Historians who know say, "That really is Hitler" (Joachim Fest), or "Ganz has Hitler's voice to near perfection. It is chillingly authentic" (Ian Kershaw). Set in the final fortnight of the Reich, as the Russians close in on the bunker, this epic account of the Nazis' Götterdämmerung is visceral and ultra-violent, as it should be (so many people blowing their brains out), but director Oliver Hirschbiegel's gaze has a steely, unsentimental clarity: no heroes here. Noteworthy cameo: Corinna Harfouch as Magda Goebbels, Reich Mother of the Year. John Patterson
3. Malcolm X
Princely figure … Denzel Washington as Malcolm X in Spike Lee's regal epic. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
With the lukewarm reception for Spike Lee's latest feature, Oldboy – in fact, for most of his work, barring documentaries, in the past 20 years – it's easy to forget how great he can be when he's on his game. Malcolm X is, arguably, Lee's finest three hours and 12 minutes – an appropriately regal epic about a princely figure in Black American history that demonstrates all Lee's virtues as a film-maker (dynamism, edginess, dramatic intensity) and none of his flaws (sloppiness, self-indulgence). One of his biggest budget efforts, it nearly didn't get made; on advice, allegedly from Francis Ford Coppola, Lee "got the movie company pregnant" – that is, extending production far enough to force an increase in budget. Even so, Lee only managed to complete thanks to loans from rich supporters, including Bill Cosby and Oprah Winfrey.
Structurally, it's a classic biopic: it covers events from before Malcolm X's birth up to his death, and beyond. And yet, through felicitous use of leitmotifs and repeated imagery, it has shape and unity, and none of that one-damn-thing-after-another feel of so many similarly scaled films. Imbuing a complex, deeply charismatic figure with breadth and depth while nailing the physical impersonation, Denzel Washington is magisterial in the title tole. (He should have won the Oscar in 1993, but was robbed of it by Al Pacino, for Scent of a Woman.) Lee and Arnold Perl's historically faithful script briskly covers Malcolm's tragic childhood and zoot-suited gangster years (an excuse for a cracking dancehall sequence) and, eventually, his conversion to Islam in prison that led to his becoming an inspiration for the Black Power movement before his untimely death.
Never one to shy away from controversy, Lee accurately depicts X's once hardline separatist politics and understandable hostility to the white world that oppressed him. Predictably, the film was highly controversial. Yet even the most hardened, anti-X sceptic would be moved by the closing montage, an electric sequence featuring knife-sharp editing, stirring archive footage, Terence Blanchard's surging soundtrack, Spartacus allusions and a cameo appearance from Nelson Mandela. Leslie Felperin
2. The Social Network
The social skills of a mouse pad … Jesse Eisenberg as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Most people who are opposed to The Social Network, a biopic of the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that contains an unusually high level of conjecture, offer the excuse that they don't like Facebook. Well, neither do the film's director, David Fincher, and its writer, Aaron Sorkin, if the unambiguously cautionary tone of the movie is anything to go by. The sinister score by Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor embodies the mood: industrial rumbles, distant alarms and a faint buzzing that suggests the sound of something, or someone, short-circuiting.
It's a supreme joke that Facebook, which helped redefine communication in the 21st century, should have come from two Harvard undergraduates with the social skills of mouse pads and the popularity of computer virusus. As played by Jesse Eisenberg, Zuckerberg sounds like the speaking clock having a panic attack. Ninety per cent of what he says indicates that he regards you as privileged to live in his world; the remaining 10% only seems that way. Eduardo Saverin, played by Andrew Garfield, is taller and better looking, but his handsomeness is undercut by an earnest expression that's always on the verge of crumpling with joy or anxiety.
Sorkin's screenplay, based on Ben Mezrich's book The Accidental Billionaires, scuppers any celebratory air by cutting back and forth between Facebook's rise and the multi-million dollar lawsuits in which Zuckerberg later becomes entangled. We see him sued by the strapping Winklevoss twins (both played, with the aid of digital trickery, by Armie Hammer), who had hired him to mastermind a dating site, and also by Saverin. Zuckerberg isn't given any opportunity to savour his salad days. It's as if the film-makers wanted to hit him with an almighty hangover before he'd had a chance to knock back a shot.
A minor plot-point involving a caged chicken that is fed the meat of its own species provides an insight into the picture's concerns about the creators and frequenters of Facebook. But no one aspect is predominant. The movie contains elements of screwball comedy, courtroom drama and class satire; it also touches on tragedy, asking what Zuckerberg might have forsaken on his way to world domination. RG
1. Andrei Rublev
Savage history … Tarkovsky's masterpiece Andrei Rublev. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
Viewers and critics always have their favourites, but some films achieve masterpiece status, universally agreed on. Andrei Rublev undoubtedly has it, even though it's a film that people often feel they don't, or won't, get. It is 205 minutes long (in its fullest version), in Russian, and in black and white. Few characters are clearly identified, little actually happens, and what does happen isn't necessarily in chronological order. Its subject is a 15th-century icon painter and national hero, yet we never see him paint, nor does he do anything heroic. In many of the film's episodes, he is not present, and in the latter stages, he takes a vow of silence. But in a sense, there is nothing to "get" about Andrei Rublev. It is not a film that needs to be processed or even understood, only experienced and wondered at.
From the first scene, following the flight of a rudimentary hot-air balloon, we're whisked away by silken camera moves and stark compositions to a time and place where we're no less confused, amazed or terrified than Rublev himself. For the next three hours, we're down in the muck and chaos of medieval Russia, carried along on the tide of history through gruesome Tartar raids, bizarre pagan rituals, famine, torture and physical hardship. We experience life on every scale, from raindrops falling on a river to armies ransacking a town, often within the same, unbroken shot.
With Andrei Rublev, Tarkovsky was consciously crafting a language that owed nothing to literature, and it's a pity so few others followed him. In today's cinema, we're still served up linear, cause-and-effect biographies of artists as if, by doing so, we'll understand the person and be able to make sense of their art. Andrei Rublev operates according to a different understanding of time and history. It asks questions about the relationship between the artist, their society and their spiritual beliefs and doesn't seek to answer them. "In cinema it is necessary not to explain, but to act upon the viewer's feelings, and the emotion which is awoken is what provokes thought," wrote Tarkovsky in 1962.
Despite its apparent formlessness, Andrei Rublev is precisely structured and entirely aesthetically coherent. Acts of creation are mirrored by acts of destruction, there are themes of flight, of vision, of presence and absence; the more you look, the more you see. And then there are the horses, Tarkovsky's perennial favourite: horses rolling over, horses charging into battle, swimming in the river, falling down stairs, dragging men out of churches. At times the screen resembles a vast Brueghel painting come to life, or a medieval tapestry unrolling. We're always conscious of life spilling out beyond the frame, and never conscious of the fact that this was made in the USSR of the 60s. In Tarkovsky's own turbulent time, the film lit all manner of controversy. Its Christian spiritualism offended the Soviet authorities; its depiction of Russia's savage history upset nationalists such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and its challenging form led to various cuts. After opening in Moscow in 1966, it was suppressed until the 1969 Cannes film festival, and didn't reach Britain till 1973.
We don't necessarily know, or need to know, how Andrei Rublev works or what it's telling us, but by the end we're in no doubt it's succeeded. In the closing minutes, the film pulls off its most famous flourish: the screen bursts into colour and we're finally ready to see Rublev's paintings in extreme close-up. Coming, as they do, at the end of this epic journey, they can reduce a viewer to tears. As the camera pores over the details, the tiny jewels on the hem of a robe, the lines forming a pitiful expression on the face of an angel, the tarnished gilding of a halo, we feel like we understand everything that's gone into every brushstroke. We're reminded of what beauty is. It is as close to transcendence as cinema gets. Steve Rose
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