biopic

The Aviator (2004)

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I’ve been slowly but surely working my way through Martin Scorsese’s filmography; I gave a rundown of what I’ve been up to in my Cape Fear review here, and I’ve worked my way from having only previously seen Shutter Island, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and The Last Waltz as of last year to now also having seen Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Cape Fear (obviously), Casino, and now The Aviator. At about halfway into the film’s staggering 171-minute runtime, I turned to my friend and stated that, although I understand that this might be a heretical opinion, I thought it was so far Scorsese’s best work that I had seen. After viewing the film’s more meandering and slow-moving second half, I’m not so sure that’s the case, but it may still very well be my favorite. All cards on the table, however, almost all of that enjoyment comes in the form of an absolutely marvelous performance from Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn, which having just watched Suddenly Last Summer, it’s pitch-perfect and an utter joy to watch. That the film becomes less interesting when Hepburn moves on from being courted by the playboy Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) to starting her affair with the still-married Spencer Tracy, as she did in real life, is not a surprise. 

The Aviator is the story of one Howard Hughes, whose Houston-based family business made a fortune in drill bits for oil wells, and the film opens on Hughes engaging in his two great passions: aviation (naturally) and movies. He hires Noah Dietrich (John C. Reilly) to manage his business so that he can put all of his attention into the completion of his war picture Hell’s Angels, a cause which ultimately takes him over three years and costs $4M ($77.3M in 2025, adjusted for inflation), nearly bankrupting him, but catapulting him into the public consciousness as the archetypal 20th Century Renaissance Man: a brilliant engineer, a playboy with the most beautiful women in Hollywood, and an artist. He also completely seizes up under any kind of greater attention, represented by him having a “whiteout” as the frame fills with light. Hepburn is immediately drawn to him, and the couple’s romance is quite a lot of fun, as she’s an unconventional woman who’s drawn to him, dazzled but not blinded, and she helps to ground him. His ongoing filmmaking career leads him to dalliances with other actresses while his oversight of Hughes Aircraft demands more of his attention, and after a disastrous visit to the Hepburn family compound, the two split up. All of this is intercut with Hughes continuing to design and engineer various aircraft, with one such plane making him, at the time, the fastest man who had ever lived. 

When we did our podcast episode about Boogie Nights, Brandon drew a connection between it and Goodfellas, specifically in both films’ bifurcation into a “fuck around” half and a “find out” half, with 1980 as the dividing line. Casino has that same symmetrical structure, and The Aviator does too, among some other Scorsese-isms that I’ve started to notice, like federal agents being used for petty retaliation and planes running out of fuel while flying over golf courses. Unlike in Casino and Goodfellas, however, the main character’s downfall in the “find out” back half are a result of Hughes’s mental illnesses, rather than a more traditional tragic flaw, like Sam Rothstein’s need to be envied or Henry Hill’s inability to break free from the allure of the power that organized crime gave him. The film essentially shouts at you through a bullhorn that Scorsese sees himself in Hughes and although he doesn’t shy away from portraying Hughes’s outlandish behavior like extremely precise eating habits, obsessive handwashing (to the point of causing himself to bleed), and paranoid wiretapping of his girlfriend Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale)’s phones, it’s not those things that bring Hughes down. Scorsese’s Hughes is a Randian achievement of infamy by merit, precision, and perfectionism, and his failures have to be that he’s too much of a perfectionist and he pushes himself past his limits — the kinds of things that you would disingenuously call weaknesses in a job interview. The appearance of an antagonizing force in the form of PanAm president Juan Trippe (Alec Baldwin) and his senator patsy Ralph Owen Brewster (Alan Alda) moves the narrative along but it’s not really Trippe or Brewster that Hughes is ever really fighting; it’s himself and his increasingly severe compulsive acts. Once he overcomes the agoraphobia he develops following the latest of several experimental aircraft crashes and delivers a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-style speech to Brewster’s subcommittee, the narrative thrust has hit its climax. Hughes was an ubermensch, albeit an eccentric one, and Scorsese is the Hughes of the film world. 

I’ll admit that this is an easy leap to make when interacting with any text, but there’s a special focus on Hughes’s tenderness in his approach to the machines that he creates. Hughes doesn’t do “test pilots”; he gets out there and he flies the thing himself, and the fact that his cockpit and his director’s chair are the same seat is made very literal early on when he flies around amidst the pilots shooting Hell’s Angels. When something doesn’t work, he keeps trying, even when the need for it has passed. He first dreams up the “Hercules” air carrier as a means to help the troops in WWII, but despite taking government development money, he doesn’t get the thing completed until after the war is over because it has to be perfect, just like a film has to be perfected before it gets sent out to the general public, even if doing so means that it misses its cultural moment. I have to admit that none of that is all that interesting to me, just like I’m not really all that interested in any of the film’s various historical inaccuracies (the film presents Hughes as making his firebrand subcommittee speech after coming out of his reclusive “locked in a movie theater and pissing in jars” period, when in fact the committee hearings were 1947, a solid ten years prior to his 1957 isolation). What is interesting to me is that this is a film that I don’t think could be made today.

The Aviator was released during what was probably the last time the general public was willing to accept an epic narrative about a real life “hero” of public stature. Contemporary figures of equivalent wealth, status, and public identity are far too accessible to the general public, and the extent to which some of the most powerful people in the world have sacrificed their mystery and allure on the altar of social media (not to mention their morals and ethics) and flat-out embarrassed themselves on an international stage means that they’ve forsaken any awe or reverence that they might have otherwise had. The pursuit of being the most liked boy by a vocal minority of people who are overrepresented online has shattered any opportunity for a contemporary millionaire inventor to be respected, for better or worse, not to mention that it’s fundamentally broken many of our critical institutions. Retroactively, it makes this entire genre seem like propaganda, and it probably always was, intentionally or not. That’s just the way of the future. 
Finally, I found this one a fun experiment in seeing what Scorsese would do with a more family-oriented picture. Most of his films are R-rated and notoriously so, with Goodfellas setting the record for the most uses of the word “fuck” in a movie at 300, a record that was broken five years later with 422 uses in Casino, and when the upper records started getting a little crowded, The Wolf of Wall Street had 569 uses in 2013. I’m no moral guardian, but I will say that there’s something to be said for playing around with moderation as The Aviator, as a PG-13 film, got exactly one “fuck” and it hit a lot harder than any single or cumulative use in the other Scorsese pictures I’ve seen. Part of this is the nature of the setting, which allows for Blanchett’s Hepburn to gush out “Golly!” and many other early period accurate transatlanticisms (and it’s a hoot every time). Scorsese usually goes for broke by leaning into the extremes, and it was interesting to see him do something different. This wasn’t his first non-R film, of course, as Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, New York, New York, and The King of Comedy were all rated PG (albeit they predate the PG-13 rating), as is The Age of Innocence, and his Dali Lama picture Kundun was PG-13, but this feels like his first movie that you could catch on cable on a Saturday afternoon during a family get together and reasonably expect most of the people present to enjoy it.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)

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Sometime recently, I was telling a friend of mine (a fellow freak, if you will) a story that I had just read in an interview with one of Yukio Mishima’s former lovers. The person was a sex worker, and Mishima picked them up at a gay bar with the intention of having something longer term, but they ended up only meeting twice, because the sex worker was so disturbed by the scene that Mishima wanted. In essence, he didn’t want a partner; he wanted a witness, someone to watch as Mishima committed play-seppuku – complete with a false dagger and a red sash that took the place of Mishima’s entrails and blood. According to the account, Mishima came to complete erection and ejaculated at the time that he drew the false blade across his stomach, all without ever touching his genitals. I haven’t been able to find that interview again, but it crosses my mind often. Mishima was an awful man, but he’s nonetheless fascinating, and it’s an endless source of fascination to me whenever I stumble across some incel fascist on the internet who worships Mishima but is bigoted against queer people; it’s a truly fascinating compartmentalization of ideological conflicts. As a result of recounting that anecdote, there’s been a lot of Mishima talk in the friend group lately, which culminated in a recent screening of Paul Schrader’s 1985 biopic Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. 

The film, which features a score composed by Philip Glass (when his name appeared on screen, one of my friends declared “I knew it! He loves arpeggios!”) and which was executive produced by both Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, is a true technical achievement. The narrative takes place in three different segments, some of which break down further into smaller sub-sections. There are the biographical sections, which include everything prior to the fateful day that Mishima attempted his coup (all in black & white) and the day of said sad little effort (in color). Although there is factual information in these sections—like the fact that Mishima was isolated from the rest of his family as a child by his grandmother, who forbade him from sport, sunlight, and playing with other boys—the film has very little interest in the elements that make up a traditional drama about a real person. This isn’t a biography of Mishima so much as it is a portrait of him, and it’s an expressionistic one at that. 

Where this is most apparent is in the way that Schrader adapts, with extreme brevity, parts of three different Mishima novels. The first segment is based upon The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, which was loosely based upon the arson of the golden pavilion at Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto. In it, a boy named Mizoguchi, who is afflicted with a debilitating stammer, becomes an acolyte of the titular temple but comes to hate it and ultimately burns it down (this is an oversimplification of the plot, but so is the retelling in the film). The second segment is based loosely on one of the four characters who populate the novel Kyoko’s House, in which a young actor named Osamu agrees to sell himself to a woman who is part of the yakuza in exchange for the cancellation of his mother’s debts; he and the woman become lovers, and they begin to partake in sadomasochism that ultimately leads to both his death and hers. The third adapts part of Runaway Horses, a 1930s-set period piece about a young man named Isao who, trained in the samurai code by his father, resents the apparent Westernization and materialism of his community and nation, so he plots to assassinate several key government figures in order to halt the spread of capitalism and its influence upon Japan. 

Although the biographical segments are shot in a more realistic style (the black & white “history” being filmed very traditionally, while the “day of the coup attempt” segments are all done with handheld cameras to add a kinetic energy to the proceedings), the narrative adaptation sections have a lovely artificiality. The room that Osuma and his lover share is a vaporwave lover’s nest in a black void, and Mizoguchi and his friend walk a constant path around a scale replica of the temple on stones that imply a path across a body of water that is no more than a painted floor. Isao and his friends plan their assassinations within another room in a void, but when their plans are stopped by the authorities, this is represented by all of the panels comprising the room’s walls being pulled outward and collapsing as police surround them from all sides. It’s a bold stylistic choice, but one that pays off, as these are the coolest and most interesting parts of the film, and as a metaphor for Mishima himself, it’s also very clever. Each of the men who populate these narratives represent some part of Mishima’s psyche. Pavilion’s Mizoguchi is obsessed with an ideal of beauty and longs to set it free just as Mishima was obsessed with the traditional Yamato-damashii (Japanese cultural traditions and values) and was willing to commit destructive acts to see it unshackled; Osuma represents Mishima’s devotion to his ideal, imperialist vision of Japan and his willingness to be hurt or even killed in a masochistic relationship with that vision; and Runaway Isao’s ultranationalism is Mishima to the core, down to the eerie way in which Mishima predicted (or perhaps announced) his death, as he and Isao share the same fate. 

If you’re looking for a scholarly work about Yukio Mishima, this isn’t it. One of our friends (the same one who identified Glass’s arpeggios) asked if she would need to know anything about Mishima before watching the movie, and we told her “no” before the screening, but I’m not sure I’d say the same thing now. From a narrative perspective, having no knowledge about Mishima (and especially not knowing how he died) makes the ending more shocking and perhaps more powerful, but I’m also not sure how much one would get out of this if this was their first introduction to him. If anything, as the film does little to elaborate on the extent to which Mishima’s views were utterly fascistic, it could end up making him more of a figure of admiration for his life (which is, uh, bad) and not for his literature (which is fine, in my opinion). The man wrote a play entitled My Friend Hitler, after all, and although scholarship is split on whether it’s a fascist work or an anti-fascist one, I’m going to make Roland Barthes roll over in his grave a little on this one and say that, in this case, what we know of the author is relevant to interpretation of the text. On the whole, that’s a bit of a Paul Schrader specialty—the line between apologia and empathy is always fuzzy in his work—but it’s worth noting that his first choice was to adapt Forbidden Colors, arguably Mishima’s most overtly homosexual work, was rejected by the Mishima estate, which led to the inclusion of Kyoko’s Room instead, so the extent to which he was able to craft a fuller portrait of the man was undeniably curtailed. 

The movie is vibrant, and, as an impressionistic telling of the life of a … let’s say “conflicted” writer, it’s beautiful and impressive. I’m not sure it’s a great movie, but it’s certainly a cool one, and it’s worth checking out if you have any interest in Mishima and his work.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Movie of the Month: The Music Lovers (1971)

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Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before and we discuss it afterwards. This month Brandon made Hanna, Boomer, and Britnee watch The Music Lovers (1971).

Brandon: The ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine is awful to watch. Daily doomscrolls of the latest atrocity footage from Ukraine have been a weight on our hearts & stomachs for months, so it’s understandable that Westerners distanced from the conflict feel the urge to do something to help, however small.  People are being weird about it, though.  Recalling the xenophobic “freedom fries” days of post-9/11 America, there has been a recent online push for “cultural boycotts” of all things Russian, often punishing the lives & work of Russian people for the actions of the Russian government.  It’s a modern Red Scare reboot that has US bar owners dumping Stoli vodka down the drain and EA Sports removing digital representations of Russian teams from their video games – symbolic gestures that do nothing to ease the suffering of Ukrainian people but do a lot to fan the flames of Slavophobia. 

The strangest example of these cultural boycotts I’ve seen in the past couple months was from, of course, a rando on Twitter.  In response to the tweet “banning all things russian is so bizarre and it will definitely trigger an increase in xenophbia against russian (and slav) immigrants”, the rando replied “Don’t think that matters now , I can’t even listen to Tchaikovsky without feeling sick”.  That is obviously not the most unhinged exchange I’ve seen on that platform, but it’s still an odd sentiment.  It’s also one that’s been echoed in real-world actions, with multiple philharmonic orchestras around the globe removing Tchaikovsky symphonies from their programmes.  I really only know two things about Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s place in Russian history: he was disregarded by contemporaries for not being nationalist enough in his music (embracing influence from Western outsiders in his compositions), and his cultural importance is still often downplayed by Russian musicologists because he was homosexual.  I’m not sure how boycotting a dead, gay Russian iconoclast is supposed to ease the suffering of modern Ukrainians, but I also was never clear on how a “freedom fries” culinary rebrand was supposed to protest France’s opposition to our own government’s invasion of Iraq twenty idiotic years ago.

To be fair, I’m missing a lot of cultural context here, since most of my biographical knowledge of Tchaikovsky comes from Ken Russell’s over-the-top, loose-with-the-facts biopic The Music Lovers (starring Richard Chamberlain as the 19th Century composer).  The Music Lovers mostly focuses on Tchaikovsky’s marriage to Antonina Miliukova (played by Glenda Jackson), whom Russell portrays as an insatiable, fantasy-prone nymphomaniac. Unable to copulate with his wife, as he is anchored to the extreme right end of the Kinsey Scale, Tchaikovsky becomes increasingly volatile as a person and unproductive as an artist throughout the film. Although he’s solely attracted to men, he finds himself torn in all directions by a small coven of women: his horndog wife, her grifter mother, his overly adoring sister, and his wealthy stalker/patron. At the time when he was working, being officially outed as gay would have ruined his career as a composer. In a modern context, it makes him Cool as Hell, the perfect subject for a Ken Russell film – especially as his repressed desires drive him into a drunken, sweaty mania. When his closeted relationship with a longtime male lover reaches its violent breaking point, Russell’s usual erotic funhouse nightmares spill onto the screen in spectacular ways, matching the explosively violent piano stabs that typify Tchaikovsky’s music. I’m particularly fond of a drunken train ride where his wife fails to seduce him in the sloppiest, most explicit maneuvers she can manage and the climactic sequence where the composer’s pent-up creativity floods onto the screen and washes away the last semblance of reality holding the entire picture together.

Russian state-sanctioned homophobia is still alive & well in the 2020s, so it’s unlikely that a cultural boycott on Tchaikovsky’s music is an effective way to stick it to Putin & The Kremlin.  There’s something genuinely heartbreaking in The Music Lovers about Tchaikovsky’s urge to fit in with heteronormative society by pursuing “spiritual relationships” with women in search of “marriage without a wife,” even as Russell finds lewd, lurid joy in the conflict.  Tchaikovsky’s violent compositions & barely-closeted homosexuality lands him firmly under the Misunderstood Mad Genius umbrella where Russell loved to play, and I’m not convinced he would’ve had any easier of a time living & working as a gay man in the country’s modern era – especially considering the legal troubles of contemporary iconoclastic artists like Leto director Kirill Serebrennikov (who incidentally has a movie titled Tchaikovsky’s Wife premiering at this year’s Cannes) and the punk band Pussy Riot.  Then again, Russell’s Tchaikovsky biopic is so indulgent in its fantasy sequences and stylistic expressiveness that it’s likely foolish to form any concrete historical or political conclusions without further research.

Hanna, how useful or trustworthy do you think The Music Lovers is as a historical biography of Tchaikovsky?  Do you feel like you learned anything about his place in Russian culture from the movie, or do you think it excels more as an excuse for Russell to indulge his own volatile creative impulses?

Hanna: Per Roger Ebert, “The Music Lovers is totally irresponsible … as a film about, or inspired by, or parallel to, or bearing a vague resemblance to, Tchaikovsky, his life and times”. Truthfully, I really didn’t know anything about Tchaikovsky before watching The Music Lovers, and I was doubtful that any part of the film could serve as a remotely reliable biography until after following up on some of the key points online. I think that Ebert is technically correct in his assessment of the film, but I don’t care! It was a pure Russell festival of opulent indulgence, and I was totally into it.

I read up a little bit on Tchaikovsky immediately after returning from Brandon’s watch party (emphasis on “a little bit”), and from what I could glean, the skeleton bolstering The Music Lovers is more or less accurate (e.g., his very compelling patron relationship with Nadezhda von Meck, his disastrous relationship with Antonina, the trauma of his mother’s death from cholera). However, Russell has draped this skeleton in an absolutely thrilling, garish, psychosexual drama. I’m not sure that I learned anything about Russia from this movie, and I don’t think I ever felt a strong “Russian” identity in the film. In fact, I had to continuously remind myself throughout the movie that the film was based in Russia as the actors accosted each other in British accents. The Music Lovers also mostly focuses Tchaikovsky’s ill-fated marriage to Antonina and the period of creative stagnation and isolation that followed, so I always felt like it was more concerned with Tchaikovsky’s mental landscape than anything else; I never had much of a sense of the Russian society surrounding Tchaikovsky during the middle stretch of the movie, except maybe during the Swan Lake performance, where he’s awkwardly wedged between his wife and Count Chiluvsky, surrounded on all sides by members of the Russian art crowd. I’m a passive fan of Tchaikovsky’s music so I had a vested interest in learning about his life, but I found myself more drawn to the hazy dream and nightmare spaces that Russell conjured than the historical, cultural, or objective details of Tchaikovsky’s life. I’m thinking especially of Tchaikovsky’s long stay in von Meck’s “small” cottage, which was an especially evocative, mist-laden affair detailing a distant queerness and eroticism that transcended the historical moment (although it had all the dressings of the period, which were an absolute pleasure to behold). The train car (pure nightmare!) and Tchaikovsky’s apartment (so lush! so pink!) are equally hard to leave behind. At the same time, his mental landscape was, of course, directly informed by the politics of his time, so it’s impossible to separate them completely.

Boomer, I know you’re a fan of Russell’s comingling of high-falutin sensibilities and gaudy mayhem. Personally, The Music Lovers scratched that itch perfectly, and delivered some genuinely moving human moments along with it. How does this stack up for you in the Ken Russell canon?

Boomer: Oh no! Reports of my knowledge of Ken Russell movies are greatly exaggerated! As an adult, I’ve only seen Altered States many times and Salome’s Last Dance the once, although I have extremely vivid memories of Lair of the White Worm during HBO’s free preview weekend when I was far, far too young for it. Within my limited experience (as a viewer and hearing Brandon talk about them on our Lagniappe episodes of the podcast), however, I can confirm that his films are generally disinterested in attempting to adhere to the confines of realism. It’s rare, even among the most talented directors, for the creator to forsake the concept that the camera is objective or an observer and instead make something that attempts to capture the subjectivity of feelings. It’s not real, surreal, or hyperreal: it is simply unreal, but is somehow universal as a result. Altered States has this as its text: that the altered, uh, states of human consciousness are just as real as the one we “agree” is reality. In Salome, it’s all about the play within the film; both are fiction, but the viewer is expected to preferentially conceptualize one as “reality.” In the former, this is done for horror, in the latter it is done for comedy, and in The Music Lovers, it’s done for transcendence. 

During the first scene in which Tchaikovsky performs at the piano, I was absolutely captivated by its minimal dialogue and the flights of fancy and fantasy that the various listeners feel as they attend. Similarly, music critic Deems Taylor describes how Fantasia begins with impressions of the orchestra and then moves into more abstract concepts as the music “suggest[s] other things to your imagination,” and that’s often the draw of classical music and the live performances thereof, at least for me. I go into our Movies of the Month with as little foreknowledge as possible, and when it comes to films that have a minimal pop culture footprint (like this one, although it certainly deserves better), that means that I go into these completely blind. Starting at the nine minute mark, it indulges in twelve minutes of people attending a performance and the vision of what the music means to each of them, and although each imagines a different scene, all of them are suffused with an almost palpable yearning, a longing for the romance of familiarity and simplicity, of excitement and newness, and of a time irretrievable. Maybe I’m just dense, but I hadn’t even put together at that point that our lead was Tchaikovsky. (The title card, which reads Ken Russell’s Film on Tchaikovsky and The Music Lovers, is both completely accurate and somewhat impenetrable, on purpose).  I would have been perfectly satisfied if the whole film had simply been people listening to Tchaikovsky compositions and then having rapturous daydreams. That it leaves that conservatory hall and surveys much larger sections of the lives of others is icing on the cake. 

Britnee, every time I engage with a text that’s about a creator—a movie about a playwright, a book about a painter, a comic about an illustrator—there’s a little light that goes off in my head that tells me to look for the way in which the person creating that text is commenting upon the act or process of creation. Not every work that meets that criteria is necessarily being used by the author to talk about their work or the work of others, but it’s a pretty common rhetorical and narrative device. For me, when I apply that perception filter to The Music Lovers, what that part of my brain wants this to be is a story about the death of creativity as it relates to being in a relationship; that is to say, it feels like something that would  have been created by someone who, in their personal life, was feeling creatively stifled by their partner. I can’t find any evidence that this was the case for Russell here (he and his first wife had been married for thirteen or fourteen years at this point and would remain so for another eight or nine, and he was making a film nearly every year during this time with no apparent writer’s block), but I wonder if you got that same feeling, or if you felt something different. In other words, what, if anything, do you think Russell is saying about being an artist? 

Britnee: While I’m a fan of his movies, I don’t really know that much about Russell as a person or an artist. That’s embarrassing to admit, so shame on me. All I know is that he’s some sort of perverted genius. As the audience journeys thorugh the tortured life of Tchaikovsky, I have to admit there were times that I questioned what was the biographical component of Tchaikovsky versus what was the influence of Chamberlin versus what was the personal touch from Russell. Tchaikovsky struggled to live a truly authentic life, so what did that mean about his art? All of what he longed for was put into his musical creations. Russell’s films are known for being beautiful fever dreams, but I’m sure that he had his fair share of hardships (hopefully not as much as Tchaikovsky). I think he’s trying to remind us all of the struggles that artists endure to give us something that makes our lives more enjoyable. There is always pain lurking behind something beautiful. I didn’t think that Russell was trying to say something about how relationships can hinder the work of an artist, but now that I’m thinking about it, that seems pretty likely considering that the romantic relationships in film were what stopped Tchaikovsky from creating. And yes, it seemed to be more personal than just an exaggeration on a historical fact. I definitely want to give this another watch with this in mind!

Speaking of relationships, I was absolutely fascinated with Tchaikovsky’s relationship with Madame Nadezhda con Meck. I was ignorant to this prior to watching The Music Lovers, so I was completely enamored by it on the initial watch. The horniness between the letters and visits to her estate without her physical presence had me so giddy with excitement. It was so kinky and so dramatic!

Lagniappe

Boomer: Above, Brandon mentioned four women who governed Tchaikovsky’s life—Nina, her mother, sister Sasha, and Nadezhda von Meck—but we’d be remiss to not mention the fifth: Tchaikovsky’s own mother. Her death haunts the composer for his whole life, literalized by Russell on screen as we see Tchaikovsky as a child witnessing her traumatic death at the hands of physicians attempting to treat her cholera, and those images reappear throughout his life. That Tchaikovsky’s life is in the shadow of such personal and intimate tribulation lends the whole thing an air of not just tragedy but inevitability. 

Hanna: I have a plan to mine the world of media to discover the truth about Tchaikovsky! To start, this weird little Disney mini-autobiography from 1959 is lacking in emotionally charged train-car seductions and (of course) absolutely refuses to acknowledge Tchaikovsky’s sexuality, but I think the childhood sequence still captures his passionate, manic energy and dependence on platonic female relationships.

Britnee: I’ve loved every Ken Russell movie I’ve ever seen, so I’m on a mission to watch them all! I’m probably not going to come out of this the same. Thank god for therapy.

Brandon: As this is his third entry in our ever-expanding Movie of the Month canon (after Crimes of Passion & Salome’s Last Dance), I believe we should declare Ken Russell as Swampflix’s official MVP.  Before he loses this blog-historic lead to the likes of Mario Bava or Tobe Hooper (who both have two MotM selections to their name), I say we all join in Britnee’s mission and rebrand this feature the Ken Russell Movie of the Month, sinking forever further into the madness of his filmography. 

Next Month: Boomer presents Embrace of the Serpent (2015)

-The Swampflix Crew

Tove (2021)

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It’s totally understandable to feel burnt out on biopics as a genre.  They’re often formulaic to the point of self-parody, especially the American star-vehicle variety that seems specifically designed to generate applaudable clips for Oscar highlight reels.  The recent Finnish film Tove admittedly does little to reinvent the biopic, but it at least finds ways to make its overly familiar tropes & structure feel intimate & tactile.  It’s unlikely that anyone who wasn’t already interested in the life & art of its titular subject would get much out of the film, which likely means it does not transcend the limitations of its genre.  Still, it doesn’t waste her fans’ time by shoehorning her into the by-the-numbers clichés that sink most biopics into tedium.

It helps that Tove is not a birth-to-death recap of Moomins creator Tove Jansson’s entire life.  It covers only her creative breakthrough & troubled romance years post-WWII.  We do not watch her experience an “Aha!” discovery at her drafting table, conjuring Moomins characters directly out of the creative ether.  She’s already doodling them in the margins of her notebooks at the start of the film, as if they were idle distractions from her “real art” as a classically trained painter.  Her journey in the film is less a rise-to-success story that is a slow, reluctant acceptance of the popularity of her more “frivolous” children’s book illustrations at the expense of her Serious Art.  Her self-acceptance as an artist runs parallel to her volatile bisexual romances in that same period, where she also finds herself reluctant to accept which opportunities are fruitful vs which are dead ends.  It’s all shot with a delicate, drunken fury in up-close, handheld engagement with Jansson as a complete, self-contradicting person – not just an iconic visual artist.

Tove is nothing mind-blowing, really, but it is lovely.  I was much more impressed with the similarly styled biopic Tom of Finland a few years back, which more aggressively shakes loose the limitations of its genre.  By contrast, the rejections of biopic cliché are much subtler here, rooted in exclusion & de-emphasis.  I’m a recent Moomins reader, so I knew nothing of Jansson’s life going into the film beyond the most popular work she left behind.  It was cool to see her raising hell in post-War Europe with her fellow art-community rebels, who dreamed that they could collectively re-shape the morals of modernity in the wreckage of the Old World.  Even though the Moomins are new to my life, I likely would’ve most appreciated this film in my teens or 20s, since it presents one of those fantasy realms where every single person you know is an artist of some kind – including your browbeating parents.  Seeing it now, it really only enhances the art I already adore by fleshing out the ferocious creator behind it.

-Brandon Ledet

Behind the Candelabra (2013)

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Stephen Soderbergh is the ultimate one-for-me-one-for-them director, but it’s still unbelievable that the final film before his (first) announced retirement was going to be a made-for-TV biopic. Seemingly fed up with the indignity of begging for funding for proper movies and the general corralling of proven auteurs to the limbo of Prestige Television, Soderbergh announced that he was bowing out of the game entirely. That “retirement” didn’t last long. If anything, he’s more prolific than ever now, having found a way to pump out a steady stream of heady low-fi genre experiments powered by smartphone cameras & celebrity actors’ goodwill. As always with Soderbergh’s career, there’s something slyly cheeky about the suggestion that he might’ve retired on a made-for-TV biopic, though; it’s as if the choice of project and the timing of the announcement were themselves a statement on the current state of the movie industry. Of course, that doesn’t mean he phoned in his work on Behind the Candelabra; it’s just as crowd-pleasing & devilishly self-amused as any of his other, better-funded films.

It helps that Behind the Candelabra isn’t so much a birth-to-death biopic as it is a chronicle of one specific, fucked-up romance that typified Liberace’s love life. Recent glammed-up biopics of outrageously costumed musicians (think Rocketman, Stardust, and Bohemian Rhapsody) have strained themselves limp trying to emphasize the Rock Star Magic of their subjects while sticking to the exact lifeless formula that Walk Hard parodied over a decade ago. Behind the Candelabra instead takes that alluring glam persona for granted, plainly presenting Liberace’s glittery hair pieces, disco-ball pianos, and on-stage limo arrivals without any stylistic embellishment behind the camera. The most the movie goes out of its way to underline the majesty of those Vegas showroom performances is in including the wide-eyed audience who ate it up with childlike wonder. It’s a glittery presentation that still mesmerizes even in its fictionalized recreations, and by the time Liberace declares “Too much of a good thing is wonderful!” at the emotional climax it’s a tough point to argue against. Of course, those performances are only a small portion of runtime, as the title invites us to witness a much uglier performance behind those glimmering stage curtains.

Beyond the curdled vintage camp, the fabulous sequin capes, and the plastic surgery gore (!!!), the film is most worthwhile for its two central performances. Michael Douglas gets to return to the sexual menace of his erotic thriller era as an already-famous, ferociously horny Liberace in his middle age years. Meanwhile, Matt Damon goes full Dirk Diggler himbo as the pianist’s naïve teenage (ha!) boyfriend, who’s taken on more as a house pet than as an equal. Once the novelty of daily champagne bubble baths with his glamorous idol wears off, Liberace’s lover starts to question just how much personal freedom he’s given up to live a lonely life of wealth. The over-decorated mansion they share is populated only by a disapproving staff who act more as prison wardens than friendly faces. The relationship rapidly declines once Liberace pressures his young ward/fucktoy to get plastic surgery to look more like his biological son (or a Dick Tracy villain, depending on your perspective); it’s an eerie undercurrent of body horror that crescendos when Damon shouts “He took my face!” in horrified acceptance of how much of himself he’s given up to accommodate the Glam God who runs his ever-shrinking world. It’s a pain that stings even worse when he realizes that he’ll eventually age out of his usefulness to the much older man, and there’s a replacement waiting in the wings to start the cycle all over again.

For the most part, Behind the Candelabra doesn’t do much to test the boundaries of the TV Movie as an artform. Soderbergh skips the pageantry of an opening credits sequence, occasionally goes meta with trips to movie sets & the Oscars, and concludes the somewhat dour drama with a show-stopping musical number, but for the most part he’s pretty well-behaved. If Behind the Candelabra is to be contextualized as a Soderbergh Experiment the way most of his movies are, it’s merely in the fact that he made a TV Movie at all. Maybe the idea of being stuck in television productions for the rest of his career was enough to make him want to retire (or at least take a break from the press), but the results are mostly as sharp & slyly playful as most of the one-for-them pictures he makes for the big screen. The performances, the costume & set design, and the jarring mix of high/low, dour/camp sensibilities are all wonderfully realized, and I’ve seen plenty of much better funded, Oscar-winning biopics about glamorous musicians do much worse with their glut than what’s accomplished here.

-Brandon Ledet

24 Hour Party People (2003)

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Usually, historical biopics about artists & musicians are a waste of time for anyone not already in love with their work, as they’re often kids-gloves hagiographies only meant to promote their subjects’ cultural significance without any genuine interrogation or nuance. 24 Hour Party People is a major exception to that rule. A meta-historical comedy tracking the unlikely transformation of the Manchester music scene from punk to new wave to raves, 24 Hour Party People is just as impressive for its multimedia playfulness as it is for its willingness to portray its cultural icons as total buffoons who had no idea what they were doing. Its protagonist, an obnoxiously pretentious record producer played by Steve Coogan, is booed and called a “cunt” in practically every room he enters, despite being majorly responsible for fostering the U.K. punk scene’s post-punk longevity. Seemingly untouchable, tragic icons like Joy Division’s Ian Curtis are equally razzed for being music-scene dorks who’re absurdly full of themselves, despite the saintly aura cultivated over the decades since their professional flameouts or deaths. It’s easy for biopics to lose track of the recognizable humanity of long-canonized artists when attempting to capture what made them special. 24 Hour Party People pulls off an amazing trick of portraying its music-scene legends as highly fallible buffoons while also maintaining the enigmatic Cool of their art. You don’t have to already be in love with New Order, The Durutti Column, or Happy Mondays to love this movie. It’s about something much more universally relatable than those bands’ cultish fandoms suggest: how all human beings are self-centered fuckups, especially artists.

I did wonder for the first third of this film whether it was appealing to me solely because I was such a sucker for the soundtrack. I can only hear so many Siouxsie, Buzzcocks, and Joy Division needle drops before my punk-youth nostalgia outweighs my critical skepticism. That question was answered decisively by the time the punk scene melted away into new wave and then was usurped entirely by rave culture, something I personally know nothing about. While the first half of 24 Hour Party People tracks its asshole protagonist’s involvement in the recording & promotion of Joy Division—a band I very much love—its back half does the same for an ecstasy-flavored jam band called Happy Mondays — a band I frankly had never heard of despite their apparent popularity. That shift in subject did not throw off my interest at all, though, since the film was less about recounting the Wikipedia highlights of its music-scene legends than it was about the unfocused, self-destructive hubris of Coogan’s would-be record label tycoon (Tony Wilson, figurehead of Factory Records). 24 Hour Party People mixes in enough real-life archival footage, winking cameos from People Who Were There, and glowing memoirs of poorly-attended Sex Pistols shows that inspired dozens & dozens of legendary disciples to appear to be the exact kind of for-fans-only historical biopic that bores the shit out of anyone not already on the hook. With time, it proves itself to be a much sharper, more incisive peek into the kinds of high-ambition, low-empathy buffoons who drive those legendary flashes of music-scene youth culture. And it turns out that getting to know the bullies, lushes, and narcissists behind the scenes doesn’t make the music sound any less cool; it just makes the story behind it a lot more believable and relatable.

No amount of praise for this film’s radical honesty or messy multimedia formalism could fully capture what actually makes the whole thing work: it’s damn funny. Even though nearly every single character is a self-centered asshole, they also come across as charming goofs. The biggest moral conundrum at the center of the story—as defined by Coogan’s suffocatingly narcissistic narrator—is how to make a name for yourself without “selling out”. Every character wants to make it big without losing their hipster cred, which only becomes more absurdly amusing as they age out of the adolescent years where that kind of pretentiousness is acceptable (the ones who survive into adulthood, anyway). Every gag is at the expense of one of these beloved artists’ self-serving quest to become beloved. Not for nothing, every gag is also successfully hilarious. Maybe the key to making a decent historical biopic about an arts scene is having a critical sense of humor about the legends you’re trying to depict. That’s at least a good first step in the direction of acknowledging their humanity, and one I can only recall being repeated in the recent black metal satire Lords of Chaos. Even that example isn’t nearly as impressive, though, as it’s poking fun at fascist metalheads who commit literal murder, whereas 24 Hour Party People profiles seemingly affable chaps who just happened to not be as Cool as you’d expect based on their classic records.

-Brandon Ledet

Bright Young Things (2003)

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It’s incredible that I didn’t catch Bright Young Things when it was still fresh in the mid-aughts. I was in college at the time, and hopelessly attracted to mid-tier indie films about queer libertines who made fabulously debaucherous lives out of indulging in drugs & gender-fuckery: Party Monster, Breakfast on Pluto, The Naked Civil Servant, etc. (as well as their better-funded equivalent in titles like Velvet Goldmine and Hedwig & The Angry Inch). A portrait of wealthy 1930s socialites enjoying the lull between wars with some lavish drag parties, booze, and cocaine, the semi-historical biopic Bright Young Things would have majorly appealed to me at the time. It’s basically a slightly classier, extremely British version of Party Monster — distinguished only by its staggering cast: James McAvoy, Michael Sheen, Emily Mortimer, Stockard Channing, Dan Aykroyd, David Tennant, Jim Broadbent, Peter O’Toole, Richard E. Grant, Jim Carter, and one-time director Steven Fry. Even watching it for the first time now, I enjoyed the film far more than I should have. If I had seen it as an impressionable young lush in desperate need of fabulous, crossdressing wastoids to look up to, I almost certainly would have worn that cheap-o second-hand DVD to dust.

Smartly, the film chooses an outsider who aspirationally looks up to the Bright Young Things as its audience-surrogate protagonist, matching the wide-eyed admiration of its target audience. It’s easy to piss away your youth and inherited wealth if you’re born into affluence. It’s a much more difficult trick to pull off for a starving artist who’s living a Bohemian lifestyle because of their class rather than their whims. The best our protagonist writer in search of a steady paycheck can hope for is to be taken in as an amusing pet by his fabulously wealthy friends (while scrounging up some chump change publicizing their decadence in the tabloids under the pseudonym Mr. Chatterbox). It’s a grift that can only last so long, which works out fine since the Bright Young Things themselves could only use London as their personal playground for as long as the world was willing to sit idle between wars. It’s a brilliant POV for the film to take, since the writer’s main motivation is to tag along as his crossdressing, gin-guzzling friends quip and party-hop from one novelty amusement to the next. His “journey” as their adopted working-class pet lands close enough to the ideal audience’s POV to highlight the film’s main attractions (boozy fancy dress parties where jaded artsy types complain “I’ve never been so bored in my entire life” despite the never-ending carnival enveloping them), while also bland enough to not get in their way.

There’s probably an excellent movie to be made about how privileged, unfulfilling, and spiritually toxic the real-life Bright Young Things’ debauchery truly was, but this isn’t it. It makes some last-minute gestures towards that kind of criticism as the party inevitably ends, but its heart really isn’t in it. The movie is much more vibrantly alive in its earliest stretches where everything is champagne, cocaine, drag, and roses, which makes it more of an aspirational wealth fantasy than anything genuinely critical or introspective. And that’s okay! The cast is brimming with delightful performers, all allowed by Fry’s hands-off direction to be as exuberantly charming as they please (with only Tennant being tasked to play a slimy turd so that there’s a vague shape of a villain to feign conflict). I might have been charmed to the point of obsession had I caught this aspirational lush fantasy as a teenager, but even now I was charmed to the point of enjoying the film far more than it likely deserves. Everyone loves a good party, and unfortunately it takes a certain amount of money & lack of self-awareness to throw one. As a frivolous adult who has worn a tuxedo & lipstick combo to a party this year (pre-COVID, mind you; I’m not a monster), I was helpless to enjoying the spectatorship of these staged parties in particular, despite my better judgement.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Shirley (2020)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer and Brandon discuss the revisionist-history biopic Shirley (2020) and the three powerful women at its core: director Josephine Decker, actor Elizabeth Moss and, of course, author Shirley Jackson.

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, YouTube, TuneIn, or by following the links below.

– Brandon Ledet & Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Capone (2020)

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I’m not sure that Josh Trank bounced back from his career-imploding misfire Fant4stic (2015) with a better film, but he’s certainly returning to the scene with a more memorable & entertaining one. Trank’s misshapen Al Capone biopic stands alone in a genre defined only one other film to date: Venom (2018), by which I mean it’s a tragically bland nothing of a movie that Tom Hardy’s bizarro performance transforms into a riotous good time through sheer force of will. Trank wrote, directed, and edited Capone himself, so you think you’d be able to credit some of the film’s entertainment value to his guiding hand. Yet, his dialogue, direction, and editing choices are all so aggressively uninteresting that it’s a miracle any audience could sit through the entire picture without slipping into a coma. Tom Hardy alone is the source of that miracle, and it’s his batshit performance that transforms Capone into something truly remarkable, even if just remarkably laughable.

Capone covers only the final year of the notorious gangster’s life, which he spent under house arrest while left senile by neurosyphilis at the age of 48. Trank attempts to use this syphilitic madness as a device that allows the narrative to surreally drift through time & space as Capone’s mind wanders through his own memories, feeling immense guilt over the violence he commissioned at the height of his Chicago crime boss days. There’s no sense of purpose or immersive atmosphere to these drifts through Capone’s subconscious, though. When the movie’s over you’re left pondering if it had anything to say about violence, guilt, syphilis, Capone, or anything at all. The movie has no discernible reason to exist except in giving Tom Hardy the freedom to run wild in the titular role. Luckily for Trank, Hardy more than makes up for any & all filmmaking deficiencies by turning Capone into a one-man freak show. Against all odds, the film truly is a spectacle.

With none of the film’s stylistic or narrative elements being compelling enough to get in his way, Tom Hardy is given the greenlight to transform Capone into a series of Nic Cagian stunts. His demented vision of the titular gangster is horrifically grotesque. He mumbles incoherently in a garbled growl more appropriate for a talking trash can than a human being. He dresses in old biddy drag, fires pistols at alligators, belts out his showtunes from The Wizard of Oz, and fires a gold-plated Tommy gun at his friends & family while aimlessly wandering the grounds of his mansion in a soiled diaper. Admittedly, all these stunts were written into the screenplay, so it’s not as if Hardy ad-libbed the film’s saving graces. He’s just responsible for making them fun to watch in a bewildering sideshow act kind of way that we normally only allow Nic Cage to perform. It has got to be the most compelling, amusingly outrageous performance you’ll ever see where a main character pisses, shits, and pukes themselves for the entire runtime while staring directly at the audience with grotesquely bloodshot eyes.

I’m embarrassed by how much fun I had with Capone. By most reasonable metrics, it’s a terrible film, one that’s only dragged down by the eye-rolling decisions made by its commanding auteur. Why hire El-P to produce a score if his work is going to be so anonymous that the audience forgets that factoid immediately after seeing his name in the opening credits? Why cast eternally loveable performers like Linda Cardellini & Kyle MaClachlan just so they can sit around watching Tom Hardy do his thing? Why the fuck do you think the world needs a ~spooky~ rendition of Louis Armstrong’s “Blueberry Hill?” Who is any of this for? It ultimately doesn’t matter. All things considered, this is a much more memorable, entertaining, and overly ambitious take on the pathetic-mobster-geezer-regretting-his-evil-deeds story than the infinitely more competent The Irishman, so it really doesn’t matter how it got there. I would watch Tom Hardy shit his pants on an infinite loop if the results were always going to be this fun.

-Brandon Ledet

Judy (2019)

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The new Judy Garland biopic is exactly what you’d expect it to be: a safe, pleasant-enough novelty built entirely around highlighting its lead, titular performance. And since Renée Zellweger won all the awards she was gunning for with the role—including an Oscar and an Independent Spirit Award for Best Lead Actress in the same weekend—I suppose it’s inarguably a success. If the performance is the movie, that means Judy is too weirdly uneven to praise with any enthusiasm. In her worst moments Zellweger awkwardly apes Garland’s broadest mannerisms while wearing the same obnoxious false teeth that won Rami Malek an Oscar for Bohemian Rhapsody. At her best, she stumbles into a stupor while recreating Garland’s late-career stage performances that somehow entirely transcends the caricature of the rest of the film to approximate some kind of spiritual possession where she legitimately is Judy, however briefly. In either case, it’s effectively pointless to critique the finer points of Zellweger’s movie-defining performance at this stage, as it’s already carried off the Oscar statue in its Dorothy-replica picnic basket. All there is left to do is single out the stray points of interest that distinguish this picture from other Safe, Award-Winning biopics – of which there are only a precious few:

  • Judy’s sole distinguishing choice on a creative level is its device of setting all its flashbacks to Garland’s youth on a studio lot sets, emphasizing the disorienting artifice of her non-childhood. Instead of following a birth-to-death biopic structure, the film saves time by starting with a pilled-out, extravagant but nearly homeless Garland during a final string of London concert dates preceding her death. It periodically cuts back to the abuses of the Studio System that landed her in such a delirious state, painting her Old Hollywood teen years as a surreal, Oz-like nightmare of pure artifice. She genuinely cannot tell which foods, romances, or inner thoughts are The Real Thing and which are stage props, thank to studio ghouls who control her every movement. This all-encompassing gaslighting operation really colors how we see the ridiculous stupor she stumbles through in later in life. An entire movie set in that kind of reality-obscuring saccharine nightmare might have actually been interesting as an art object, or at least more so than the actor’s showcase we got instead.
  • It’s uncomfortable to dwell on this observation for too long, but Judy is partially fascinating in its parallels to the current professional haze of its star. At only 50 years old, Zellweger has already been effectively discarded by her industry for being too “old” & loopy to be worthy of Lead Actress status. Until this awards campaign, the most use the Hollywood star-making machine had for her in recent years was as tabloid fodder to shame her for undergoing Noticeable cosmetic surgery. Zellweger emerged from this mistreatment understandably wobbly, which is best illustrated in her loosey-goosey Oscars acceptant speech that praised Martin Scorsese, Venus & Serena Williams, firefighters, and Harriet Tubman all in the same breath. Judy Garland was only 47 years old when she died. As much as we like to think the entertainment industry has evolved for the better since that tragedy, the parallels between Zellweger’s portrayal of that fallen star and her own offscreen behavior are . . . alarming.
  • This movie had to acknowledge Judy Garland’s significance in the LGBTQ community in some way (it is on a first-name basis with the star, after all), so it was enthralling to see how it’d go about satisfying that requirement. It hurriedly decides to store al its gay eggs in one homosexual couple’s basket, making time for Garland to befriend a same-sex British couple who wait outside her concerts for autographs. This gamble works fairly well when she spends an intimate evening with the ecstatic lads in their cozy apartment, but less so when their arc is quickly resolved as a stinger of comic relief. In either case, choosing one couple as a stand-in for All Gays Everywhere makes for an interesting tension that’s worth some careful scrutiny.
  • Jessie Buckley’s in this! She’s even second billed in the end credits, despite taking on a thankless role as Judy’s befuddled assistant. It’s nowhere near her finest work, but unlike Beast & Wild Rose, it’s a movie people will actually see.

Outside these few points of interest and the idiosyncrasies of Zellweger’s weirdly uneven performance, Judy is the exact movie you’d expect it to be based on its poster & premise. There’s nothing wrong with that kind of safe-bet indulgence, really, but it does feel like the movie has already outlived its purpose now that it has its Best Lead Actress Oscar secured on Zellweger’s trophy shelf. The best it can hope for at this point is a few basic cable broadcasts & Redbox rentals before it’s forgotten forever. In that context, it’s pretty alright.

-Brandon Ledet