Are biopics rewriting history?

Last month, the highly anticipated Bob Marley biopic Bob Marley: One Love was released in theatres. So far, it has surpassed all expectations at the box office, earning over $146 million USD worldwide.

The glaring problem with Marley's biopic is that it paints him as a saint. The film limits its storytelling to the height of Marley's career, bypassing his rise in Jamaica and the forging of his particular style of reggae. The biopic also ignores most of his infidelity, neglecting to show the full extent of his affairs with other women.

One of the reasons Bob Marley: One Love leans so heavily into hero worship is because his children were heavily involved in the production. And now the biopic stands as the document of Marley's life.

This type of criticism — that filmmakers are taking too much creative liberty when making biopics — has been levelled at the Viola Davis-led The Woman King, Bohemian Rhapsody, and most recently, two separate Elvis biopics: Baz Luhrmann's Elvis as well as Sofia Coppola's Priscilla.

Film and culture critics Bilge Ebiri, Rad Simonpillai and Niko Stratis join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to discuss the tension between fact and fiction in biopics, especially when families and estates get involved in the filmmaking process.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast on your favourite podcast player.

LISTEN | Today's episode on YouTube:

Elamin: Rad, let's set the stage by talking about some good examples of biopics, because the work of a biopic is to balance historical accuracy with a compelling story in ways that gets audiences into the theatres. So with that in mind, what biopic, in your opinion, does those things and does them well?

Rad: For me, the gold standard is Ali. And by the way, I'm very humbled to be saying this in front of Bilge, who is like the authority on all films. So, Ali, the Muhammad Ali story starring Will Smith, directed by Michael Mann, is a movie that really did capture the spirit of Ali, but also the real portrait of America at the time and the America that he was standing up against. 

Elamin: Niko, what's that biopic for you? A biopic that does these things well?  

Niko: Now, I kind of want to watch Ali again. Rad just sold this movie. I haven't watched it in a long time. For me, as a music person, it's really hard because so much of the artifice of music and storytellers are that they're writing in a very confessional and first-person narrative in their work. Part of it is they're selling you the idea of themselves. And so, to do a biopic, you have to either remove that veneer of the self or lean into it. So I think about Walk the Line a lot.

Elamin: Bilge, maybe for you, let's go in the opposite direction. What's an example of a biopic that fell short for you?  

Bilge: Among recent movies, the one that jumps out at me is the film Rustin, about Bayard Rustin, the civil rights activist. It's on Netflix. 

Colman Domingo is fantastic in it. I believe he's nominated for an Oscar. He makes the film watchable, even better than watchable. But at the same time, the film feels like such a data dump when you're watching it. I mean, it feels like the filmmakers went into it not with a screenplay, but with a checklist of, "We have to show this, have to show this, have to show this." 

Elamin: Niko, we've seen filmmakers push back on this idea that biopics need to be historically accurate. Viola Davis played the lead in The Woman King, which is about the legendary Dahomey warrior women. Viola's husband, who's a producer on the movie, was quoted saying, "We have to entertain people. If we just told the history lesson, which we very well could have, that would be a documentary." 

That movie was criticized a lot for not really telling the story of the Dahomey. What do you make of what he's saying there? The idea that biopics are here to entertain. 

Niko: I agree with that. Ultimately, we're watching a movie. We don't want to see Wikipedia played out in front of us. Not that Wikipedia is the ultimate source, but you know what I mean. I think a lot about I'm Not There, the Bob Dylan biopic where Cate Blanchett and Richard Gere both play Bob Dylan, and it's less about the truth of Dylan, because Dylan is also a guy that has always lied about the truth of his life, and it's more about the idea of the artist. We're here to tell you a story and for you to be entertained over the course of this, and hopefully afterwards, you will walk out of there with questions and think I'm going to read up on that or I'm going to look into this more. The truth of the matter is often not super entertaining.

Elamin: I think sometimes what I'm frustrated by is a biopic that is not at all interested in engaging with the mythology, and is just kind of like, "My dad was great and we're going to make a movie about him. Isn't he wonderful?" When I see the Bob Marley movie, that to me is an example of that kind of failure. The family was very heavily involved in the making of that movie. What are the pros and the cons of having the family so heavily involved in making a movie, do you think? 

Rad: I don't think there's a right answer in terms of having [family] involved. I will go right back to the Ali example where they were involved but I don't know that they necessarily had any influence on how Michael Mann was going to tell the story. They just corrected Mann on some details. And look, you have a near-perfect movie as a result of that. 

Elamin: What that makes me think of, though, is this push and pull over the fact that a biopic can end up serving as the final word on a person or at least the most accessible word on a person. And so you walk away being like, "That was the life that they lived."

Bilge: One of the reasons why I think the biopic has become so entrenched in Hollywood is that it's really its own form of IP. Biopics have familiar beats. We kind of know what we're getting. It's like a superhero movie for pointy heads. They're our superhero movies.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Ty Callender