Authors on Film

Move over, Roland Barthes, the author ain't dead yet. At least, that's what Hollywood would like us to think. No less than four biopics concerning some of our favorite pen-and-ink men and women are slated to come out in the next few years -- Paul Giametti is playing Philip K. Dick, Sandra Bullock is tentatively going to star and co-produce a film about the woman who wrote Peyton Place, Ioan Gruffudd is hopefully playing Kenneth Grahame, the author of Wind in the Willows, and (perhaps the one generating the most buzz) James McAvoy is going to be starring in a film about Ian Fleming, the man who created James Bond. Having read a little about Fleming as well as all of his original novels, I'm super excited for the Fleming flick.

This isn't a drop of the hat change for Hollywood, either. Helena Bonham Carter is playing Enid Blyton, the famous children's book author, in an upcoming BBC project, and at least two films that I know of dealing with authors came out this past year; Bright Star, about poet John Keats, and The Last Station, based on Jay Parini's novel about Leo Tolstoy. Before that we had Miss Austen Regrets and Becoming Jane, both about the venerable JA, Finding Neverland, about J.M. Barrie, The Edge of Love (Dylan Thomas) Iris (Iris Murdoch) The Hours (kind of about Virginia Woolf) Sylvia (Sylvia Plath and her husband, Ted Hughes) Love and War (Hemingway) Quills (Marquis de Sade) Miss Potter (Beatrix Potter) and Infamous as well as Capote, two films that came out almost at the same time dealing with Truman Capote.

So why do these films come out? Over my winter break I watched Love and War and finally understood why Hemingway was the way he was. It doesn't make me like his misogynistic writing any more than I did before I watched the film (even if he was played by Chris O'Donnell) but I got a fuller sense of him as a person that I wouldn't necessarily have been motivated to find in a biography. Over the last week I also watched The Edge of Love, even though I'm not a huge fan of Dylan Thomas, and Becoming Jane, which I had already seen.

The question "Why make an Author Biopic?" could probably be answered by "Why make a biopic at all?" The answer to that, I think, is the result of my Love and War watching -- we'd like to try and figure out what makes those we consider good and great tick. How was Jane able to write these fantastic love stories? She was conflicted herself about love. Why did Dylan Thomas produce all this wonderful poetry? He was a man with a lot of experiences and a lot of intense emotional things in his life. How did Ernest Hemingway come to hate women so much? He had a bad experience in one of the most difficult times in his life and never got over it.

Obviously the biopic is flawed for this reason -- in attempting to bring out these motivations Hollywood, in its true style, overdoes it sometimes. Jane Austen fans were a little miffed over how their beloved JA got turned into Anne Hatheway for Becoming Jane, who, apart from being too pretty and having a terrible accent, seemed to get far too much romantic attention than humble Jane ever got. (Come on, JA fans, were you expecting better? This is what happens to ALL your Austen adaptations.)

I personally liked Becoming Jane, not only because it was a movie filled with actors who are generally regarded as knowing a great deal about what they're doing (Maggie Smith, Julie Walters, James Cromwell, James McAvoy, Laurence Fox) but because the screen writers worked in elements from some of her novels to show a discerning audience "This might have been where Jane got the idea for..." Maggie Smith's Lady Gresham is Lady Catherine to a T, Rev. Austen's pupil Mr. Warren could be a stand in for Mr. Collins any day of the week, Jane's cousin Elizabeth bears hints of Lady Russell and Lucy Lefroy could be any number of Jane's daftly airheaded, only-out-for-the-manhunt filler characters.

If you're in the market for a movie this weekend, consider checking one of the films I've listend above out from your library or local movie rental place. If they're not profoundly insightful then at least they are an attempt to be both entertaining and educational. You might even be motivated to go out and learn more.