Che, Milk, W.: The Problem with Political Biopics

What explains the rash of political biographies being produced by Hollywood of late? In the past few months, we have seen political biographies of no less than three polarizing political figures: Che(on Che Guevara); Milk (on Harvey Milk); and W. (on George W. Bush). Yet another, Frost/Nixonis set for release.

It’s cheap to go for the easy analysis the cultural marketplace (biopic = Oscar for Best Actor) or a more involved answer discussing the emergence of Obama as a rock star/Hollywood styled politician and/or Hollywood saying goodbye to the Bush years.

There’s more than a little truth to these explanations, but not the whole truth.

Having sat through these films (save the unreleased Frost/Nixon), I was struck mostly that what these films serve the purpose of filling in some gap in mainstream histories and biographies. The titular figures, as divergent as they were, seem to hold one thing in common: they became one-name people, living embodiments of the spirit of their times, all through some great acts of reinvention.

The problem that we are left with is in trying to figure out which of these figures’ true selves: was it the person before the reinvention, or was it the person that came afterward? The emergence of post-modernism and our age’s simultaneous cynicism and longing for authenticity obscures the question even further: what if the “real” face which public figures present to us is in fact its own mask — an uncanny copy of a genuine face, but a mask nevertheless?

This is why it seems fictionalized films are left to deal with real figures. It is a mixed bag all in all.

W.: Keep your film, and gimme a shoe

Like many folks I know, I’ve been watching the best film about George W. Bush to come out lately. That isn’t W. That’s this little YouTube viral:

Alas, Oliver Stone’s W., with its $25 million budget (an exorbitant amount of which probably went to make up) and typical Stone bombast lacks the simple courage as shown by Muntadar al-Zeidi in the above, of really attacking Bush both personally and politically at the same time.

The problem of W. starts early on, when it chooses to divide Bush’s bio into two parts: his bumbling youth as a mediocre student and businessman, and his equally bumbling presidency. The two narratives are intertwined through some deft flashbacks and flash forwards, but it’s still possible to discern a defining turning point from one to another: Bush’s conversion to evangelical Christianity while recovering from alcoholism and his subsequent embrace of its community from his run against Ann Richards to the Iraq War.

This split in the narrative would work, if the thread that united them weren’t a cheapshot: George W.’s Oedipal conflict with his father George H.W. Bush is the only thread that runs through both narratives. It reduces the film’s overall meaning to that of a liberal comedic riff — mainly, that one that goes “d’ya hear the one about how George W. was a momma’s boy?”

It seems Stone does not know whether to indict Bush, mock him, or cuddle him. This problem is only magnified by lazily written dialogue. It’s one thing to cover the mandatory Bushisms that have peppered George W.’s career as the idiot in the global village. It’s another to try to take Bush’s malapropisms out of their context. The idea that Bush could say something as stupid as the well-known “Fool me twice… can’t fool me again,” anywhere other than the public speech where it appeared simply doesn’t make for good reality or fantasy.

One suspects that staying too true to Bush’s actual record would almost prove too traumatic for Hollywood. What would be more trauamtic than for liberal Hollywood to see that Bush was, in his own way, attempting to live up to the very embodiment of psychotic masculinity that Hollywood pumped out in the 1970’s and 80’s with Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson flicks?

In the end, I wonder whether Oliver Stone should have just taken his $25 million budget, bought a lot of shoes for a lot of Iraqis to throw at Bush, plus a few digital cameras to document the spectacle, and he would have gotten a better effect. Plus, who can argue with dialogue like, “This is a farewell kiss, you dog!” ?

Milk: the hagiography of hope

While Milk and W. approach the titular protagonist from a different angle (the former, directed by Gus Van Sant, definitely aimed at outright hagiography, if not beatification, of Harvey Milk), the problems remain fundamental: the split between the personal and political, the private and the public.

Milk introduces us to Harvey Milk (played by Sean Penn) in New York in the late 1960’s, then a closet queen with a white collar. He pals up with younger free-spirited Scott Smith (played by James Franco) then almost instantly ups and leaves to San Francisco in the middle of its shift from hippie refuge to gay refuge.

The narrative of Milk takes us through several moments in Harvey Milk’s early career at a brisk pace: early attempts to build power and a sense-worth among the Castro’s transient gay population; clashes with bigotry on the streets; as well as the gay-labor alliance with the Teamsters to boycott Coors.

From here, the personal and political stories of Harvey Milk’s life split: we are given Harvey Milk, the virtually unassailable liberal politician versus Harvey Milk, the careerist who dumps his lover Scott Smith for what turns out to be his winning run for City Supervisor.

Sean Penn’s Harvey Milk finally gets an adversary worthy of him in the form of Anita Bryant and the series of anti-gay referenda she helped get passed throughout the U.S. It culminates in a win that is bittersweet: it demonstrates both Harvey Milk’s political skill as well as his personal failings (which I will not spoil).

The key problem of Milk as political hagiography is that the split between Harvey Milk the unassailable liberal politician and Harvey Milk the failed lover is convenient: Milk’s failures only prove his movement bona fides: here is a man who sacrificed for the cause. There is no complexity to Harvey Milk, for whom any exercise power seems to be innately good.

The approach fails worst in a scene of a protest march condemning passage of one of Anita Bryant’s propositions. In it, Sean Penn’s Milk gives instructions to a subordinate in his Castro-based political machine to whip up the crowd, precisely so that he could intervene and demonstrate his own clout. The scene is rendered by Van Sant as simply a matter of his slyness and wits. But just as easily, this could have been rendered as Milk being a typical opportunist interest group huckster. Milk is so one-sided that even Harvey Milk’s manipulations are endearing.

That would have introduced some level of complexity to Milk’s politics, but Van Sant chooses the hagiographic myth over nuance. The inability to deal with such complexity is a key failing for the film, not in the least because it’s precisely this complexity which queer liberation now finds itself grappling with in the wake of Proposition 8.

Is “respectability” really worth it, if the people you are trying to impress are (just for example) the Mormon Church which has its own problems to deal with? Are things like same-sex marriage worth fighting for when we can’t get basic rights for transfolk into a Non Discrimination Act? Unfortunately, Milk was produced before these dilemmas really came to the fore with the complete failure of the mainstream groups to put up a decent fight against Prop 8. It has since fallen on those folks who aren’t into staging riots for the sake of the cameras to now fight it out on the streets.

Che: Two, three, many bio-pics?

Of the three films discussed here, Steven Soderberg’s Che is the only one that could be called epic in scope, or at least as I saw it. The film is currently touring the country in the form of a single 4-hour film in two parts; it will be released as two separate films later.

The division of Che’s two parts doesn’t have the problem of W. and Milk where the divide is between a “personal” narrative and a “political” one. The divide is, instead, between the guerrilla Che Guevara’s triumph in Cuba and his failure and death in Bolivia.

The daring isn’t so much in refusing to separate Che’s politics from his life – to have gone into the wilderness for the cause meant that the two were inseparable in a way that legal politics cannot understand – but in that it does not separate the arc of Che’s life from Cuba from Bolivia. The same aspects are at work in both stories.

Che, Part I consists of the guerrilla campaign in Cuba, intercut with Guevara New York on delegation after the Revolution. The New York section is punctuated with a question and answer session where Guevara narrates his actions in Cuba, a nifty narrative device (which solves the problem of W. – how do you get a famous person’s words out of their mouth without it sounding corny?)

The shooting of the New York scenes in a grainy black-and-white film, in almost documentary style, is a tip of the hat to the similarly black-and-white pseudo-documentary The Battle of Algiers (of which Soderberg’s spoken of his love). The two films also hold in common a camera that is unflinching and yet still partisan — what Gillo Pontecorvo called the “Dictatorship of the Truth.”

Soderberg’s own touch to Che is a tone that runs through the Ocean’s series as well as Traffic: a fascination with showing the gears behind big processes. Choosing to do so in a biopic is almost counterintuitive: it means treating the supporting cast as more than Che’s love interests, antagonists, friends, etc. Yet it makes sense in a film describing the revolutionary process, one in which the masses are participating as the authors. To have a biopic where the supporting cast are more than extensions of the main character makes Che unique in this wave of political biopics.

Guevara himself is shown as a man of sharp convictions and sharper politics, as he was. The common trap for revolutionaries as depicted on film is often the Popular Front effect. A case in point: to watch Steal This Movie, Abbie Hoffman was simply a radicalized liberal – the edges of the character are sandpapered (if not sand blasted) completely off. For Soderberg’s own part, having no attachment to ’60s liberalism means having Benicio del Toro’s Che unflinchingly savage Eugene McCarthy as an imperialist pig – making no concessions to the liberal guilt that made him an  anti-war candidate in 1968 likeable enough that the youth who had Che pins went “clean for Gene.” Soderberg’s courageous statement here is then to say that the matter of overlapping fan clubs aside – the world of U.S. liberals and Cuban revolutionaries are irreconcilable.

To return to the completeness of Che’s character arc: there is also a bravery to the film in exposing Guevara as so in thrall to his own eccentric ideas of a revolution – mainly: that he could dance with Moscow, but not that he would be expected to follow its lead – that it becomes his downfall in Part II’s scenes in Bolivia. Che’s monomania, necessary to the cohesion of guerrillas in Cuba, leads Guevara to one dead-end after another in Bolivia.

Indeed, if Che, Part I definitely belongs to the genre of historical epic, Part II shifts thematically from historical film to a horror film akin to the Blair Witch Project. The area in which Che and his rag-tag group of both international and locally recruited guerrillas roam is paradoxically expansive and claustrophobic. The camo-clad counterinsurgents descending from the sides of a valley upon Che’s guerrilla band are rendered as  a force of nature, punishing Guevara for his foolish adventure.

While it’s not a spoiler to say that Part II ends with Che’s martyrdom, too much detail will ruin prospective viewers’ entertainment with its treatment. Suffice it to say, Soderberg gives Che a martyrdom that is entirely human and consistent with the film’s Dictatorship-of-Truth tone.