Clash of the biopic titans

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, December 2, 2011 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments

Monroe

Here’s a pretty safe prediction: when the Oscars are handed out next February, the contest for best actress will come down to a duel between two icons, a bombshell and a battle-axe—between Marilyn Monroe and Margaret Thatcher, as portrayed by Michelle Williams and Meryl Streep. Oscar has always had a soft spot for biopics, especially if Brits, royals or showbiz icons are involved. The main event at the last Academy Awards was an unfair fight between The King’s Speech and The Social Network, as King George VI handily trumped the Machiavellian Facebook guru Mark Zuckerberg. And as the current award season warms up, it looks like real-life figures will dominate the field as never before.

They are led by a trio of heavyweights: Streep’s Thatcher in The Iron Lady, Williams in My Week with Marilyn, and Leonardo DiCaprio as Hoover in J. Edgar. Bringing up the rear in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method are Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud and Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung. The Lady adds a Nobelist wild card to the race with its portrait of Burmese opposition heroine Aung San Suu Kyi (Michelle Yeoh). Don’t count out Brad Pitt as Moneyball’s Billy Beane, the legendary manager who rewrote baseball’s bible and irrevocably changed the game. And trailing far behind the pack is W.E.’s Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough), the woman who forced the abdication that gave us that stammering George VI.

In Hollywood, where making history is almost as important as making movies, the biopic craze shows no signs of slowing down. Steven Spielberg is currently shooting Lincoln, with Daniel Day Lewis carving out his own Rushmore portrait of the American president. And next year, ghostbuster Bill Murray gains gravitas as Franklin D. Roosevelt in Hyde Park on Hudson, which has FDR and Eleanor mingling with Queen Elizabeth and King George VI (him again).

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An indie gal’s take on Marilyn Monroe

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Laurence Cendrowicz

Of all the screen goddesses that Hollywood has produced, there is no more enduring icon than Marilyn Monroe. Her career spanned just 16 years, but she remains the gold standard of sex symbols. From souvenir kitsch to Warhol silkscreens, her face is ubiquitous. Everyone from Madonna to Lady Gaga pays her homage. And when Lindsay Lohan needs to transfuse her impoverished glamour with some hard currency, she strips for Playboy, cloning the cover pose that launched the magazine, and Monroe’s career, in 1953. But an actress who actually dares to play Marilyn onscreen faces a huge challenge, not just in simulating how she looked, talked and moved, but in breaking through the platinum icon to find the woman behind it.

In My Week With Marilyn, Michelle Williams does that. She doesn’t just get away with it, she incarnates Monroe with such delicate precision and luminous depth that it’s thrilling to watch. She may not seem an obvious choice. The indie gamine—cast as troubled wives in Brokeback Mountain, Blue Valentine and Sarah Polley’s upcoming Take This Waltz—lacks Marilyn’s ample curves, and hasn’t exactly cultivated herself as a sex symbol. Which makes her transformation that much more miraculous. “You have to have courage to take on a part like this,” British director Simon Curtis told Maclean’s. “It’s like a young actor taking on Hamlet. People’s excitement in seeing her performance is palpable.”

Williams pulls off this feat of acting in a movie that is about acting. Based on memoirs by Colin Clark—who fell under Monroe’s spell while serving as a 23-year-old gofer on The Prince and the Showgirl—the story spans just a narrow slice of her life while shooting the 1957 comedy at London’s Pinewood Studios. She’s cast opposite an imperious Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh), who’s also directing. Terrified by Olivier, and paralyzed by anxiety, Marilyn seeks refuge in pills and the maternal comfort of method acting coach Paula Strasberg (Zoë Wanamaker). With her fresh marriage to Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott) already crumbling, she takes a shine to Clark (Eddie Redmayne), a callow kid who’s sharp enough to appreciate her dilemma: “Olivier,” he tells her, “is a great actor who wants to be a film star. You’re a film star who wants to be a great actress. This movie will not help either of you.”

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Newsmaker of the Year '09: Lost boy, forever

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at 3:19 PM - 0 Comments

Even more startling than the news of his death was its impact. Not since Diana has a celebrity’s sudden passing sent such a profound and lasting shock wave around the world. Michael Jackson’s career had been in the doldrums for over a decade, his reputation shattered by allegations of child molestation, his face ravaged by cosmetic surgery, his body wired on painkillers, his finances in shreds. Although his fans had remained fiercely loyal, snapping up tickets for a sold-out comeback tour that would never take place, for much of the world the King of Pop had become a sad freak—a literally pale shadow of the man-child who once moonwalked into our hearts. But after Jackson’s death on June 25, 2009, a miraculous resurrection began to take place.

As the media became consumed with conjuring his memory, parsing his significance and exploring the riddle of his death, it soon became clear that this celebrity death was shaping up to be an event on a par with the loss of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. In death, the moral scales were instantly tipped. Jackson’s iconic stature would trump his human frailties. The man once accused of being a pedophile and a predator was now cast as victim, possibly a victim of murder by lethal injection, perhaps even the target of a conspiracy. The disturbing pathology of Jackson’s personality—the enigma of the lost boy trapped in a man’s body—only enriched the myth. As a showbiz prodigy forever trying to reclaim the Neverland of his stolen childhood, he acquired tragic nobility. Like Elvis, Marilyn and Diana, here was another martyr to celebrity. Jackson had always dressed as if auditioning for divinity. And in the months that followed, pieces of him would be auctioned off like religious relics, from his diamond-encrusted socks to the white glove he wore in the 1983 Motown TV special—which is considered the “holy grail” of MJ memorabilia.

As a black man who seemed bent on erasing his race and blurring his gender, Jackson’s shape-shifting was mocked when he was alive. In death it only magnified his cultural importance. Just as Elvis Presley and Mick Jagger had plundered the moves and music of black R & B to create their burlesque empires of rock ’n’ roll, Jackson merged black music with white pop, but from the other side. He seemed intent on transforming himself into an alien creature, as if the only ethnicity that really mattered to him was extraterrestrial. With Thriller, the monster video that broke racial barriers and virtually invented MTV, he tried on a ghoulish identity that would follow him to the grave.

Jackson always fancied himself a movie star, or rather a movie character. And he received some posthumous poetic justice with the release of This Is It, the movie stitched together from rehearsal footage of the concert that never was. The film, which has grossed more than US$200 million, puts a lie to all the media speculation that his heart wasn’t in the tour, or that he no longer had the chops to pull it off. His ethereal falsetto was still intact, and his quicksilver dance moves still dazzled, as if he had no choice: the music flowed through his body like an electric current, animating every move with semaphore precision.

Had he lived to perform the tour, no doubt there would have been a concert movie, but it would have shown a slicker performer. The rehearsal footage reveals a softer, more circumspect Michael Jackson. Though the film is more hagiography than documentary, it offers a glimmer of vulnerability, and of the creative soul behind the Oz-like armour of the persona. Jackson comes across as an adult, quietly focused and firmly in command. The movie lends credence to what Elizabeth Taylor once told Oprah Winfrey, that Jackson was “highly intelligent, shrewd, intuitive.” There’s a lovely scene in which Jackson is trying to hold himself back. “Don’t make me sing out,” he pleads. “I gotta save my voice.” It’s a moment freighted with sad irony in a movie that redeems a monstrous icon by reminding us that he was only an artist.

Michael Jackson: "The Greatest"

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, June 25, 2009 at 9:08 PM - 18 Comments

Live in the Situation Room, Wolf Blitzer addressed the nation. Michael Jackson, he said, was dead. Or at least that’s what other outlets were reporting. CNN was still working to confirm Jackson’s demise.

Blitzer consulted with a reporter known for his coverage of Jackson. They debated the precise level of shock to assign this development. Another reporter, this one having been to Neverland, mentioned Princess Diana. Blitzer introduced a 30-second clip of Jackson performing as a boy, then CNN’s “chief medical correspondent” was brought in to explain what happens to the body when it goes into cardiac arrest. A discussion of Jackson’s weight ensued. Blitzer stressed the need for heart defibrillators to be more readily available to the public. Another correspondent was brought in to find some irony in Jackson’s death coming just as he was to relaunch his career. Continue…