TORONTO – As coverage of the tumultuous U.S. election campaign blankets the airwaves and social media, the film world has kept pace with several new biopics turning their lenses on the current and past American presidents.
A dramatized account of Barack Obama’s first date with wife, Michelle, is the centrepiece of “Southside With You,” while the Netflix-bound “Barry” explores the current commander-in-chief’s life in 1981 New York while attending Columbia University.
“Jackie” follows Jacqueline Kennedy in the aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s assassination,” while “LBJ” chronicles the ascension of vice-president Lyndon B. Johnson to commander-in-chief after JFK’s slaying.
As the bitter battle between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump can attest, arguably no world leader is as closely scrutinized as the U.S. president — or those seeking election to the country’s highest office. Yet despite having their every move documented and dissected by the Washington press corps and other observers, these omnipresent figures remain an endless source of fascination for filmmakers.
“That job has an enormous impact on what happens in the world,” said “LBJ” director Rob Reiner during a press conference at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.
“It’s not the biopic itself that’s interesting, because you’re not making a biopic about Millard Fillmore or Calvin Coolidge. You’re making biopics about FDR and (Abraham) Lincoln and JFK who had dramatic things happening to them when they were president,” he added. “There’s no reason to make a biopic about a particular president unless there’s something else you want to add to the conversation about the American political scene or government.”
British film writer and lecturer Ellen Cheshire said America’s history is one the country likes to tell through film, and political stories are no exception.
“You can see how America is trying address its relationship with its own country through the western; so I would imagine that the political films are doing the same sort of function of addressing and assessing its own history and place within the wider international scene,” said Cheshire, the author of “Bio-pics: A Life in Pictures.”
Ezra Winton, assistant professor of film studies at Montreal’s Concordia University, said political biopics also benefit from the powerful engine of studios driving those productions to audiences.
“They’re popular because of the marketing, because of the genre of fiction, and that form of storytelling that is the main form of consumption,” said Winton. “But they allow for a more personal look at these public figures so that people feel that they get to know these larger than life figures more intimately because of the biopic.
“What can be problematic about that is that people might walk away feeling like they really got to know Margaret Thatcher from ‘The Iron Lady,’ but really, that film is a super narrow depiction of her, and a narrow interpretation of who she was as a person,” he added. “I think they are popular for those reasons, but we also should keep in mind having a critical stance when we watch them.”
Another concern about mainstream Hollywood biopics is that they reinforce a narrow view of the political spectrum, noted Winton.
“We are raised in a society that tells us there’s pretty much a two-party system: you’re liberal or you’re conservative, you’re Democratic or you’re Republican,” said Winton, director of programming at Cinema Politica, a global network of campus and community-based screening sites showing political documentaries.
“The biopics really celebrate the political figures from that system. They’re a form of public history that, I feel, reinforce public knowledge in a way,” he added. “Rarely are they introducing or (about) relatively unknown figures, but they’re making films that they will always make money because everybody already knows who Barack Obama is or who Margaret Thatcher was.”
Winton said he would like to see more diversification within the genre, and films about other notable political figures and activists. Among his standouts is Raoul Peck’s 2000 film “Lumumba,” about Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected leader of what is now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who was toppled from power and assassinated.
For Cheshire, among the most powerful political biopics is “The Motorcycle Diaries” which dramatizes the road trip of two real-life Argentinian friends, one of whom eventually became known as Cuban revolutionary leader Che Guevera.
“There’s just so many different approaches to tell these stories,” said Cheshire. “When you’re talking about Nelson Mandela, there’s probably been about eight films in the last 30 years telling his story in different ways.
“They continue to make what’s popular.”
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