David Larsen has seen too many films "based on a true story" lately. He would like them all to go away and come back when they've worked out what "true" means.
Conviction
“What is truth, man? You heard the weirdo.” – Zaphod Beeblebrox is asked whether he’s an accessory to genocide, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
“There is no spoon.” – wisdom is given unto Neo in The Matrix, by some kid who’s clearly familiar with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
I would like a moratorium on films “based on a true story”. They can still be based on a true story; I just don’t want to see those words on the screen. I would also like a lengthy break from seeing the real-life inspirations of the film I’ve just watched in a boxed insert next to the end credits. “Oh my gahd, Christian Bale really did catch that guy’s vibe!” I. Don’t. Care.
There is no reason why great films cannot be made from true stories. Many have been, many more will be. The example currently making its way round the country would be Of Gods and Men. But I’ve seen too many films lately with a strange and very specific problem: the apparent desire to do justice to someone’s Amazing True Story gets in the way of telling the amazing true story. I’m thinking of Conviction, The Fighter, 127 Hours, and, though it’s a stronger film, Fair Game. If you took the essence of these films and recast them as pure fiction, I suspect all of them would be better for it.
Okay, 127 Hours, no. (Bad Danny Boyle. “They said it could never be done” is not sufficient reason to make a film.) And Conviction makes such a splendid job of wasting a good cast and story (a woman puts herself through law school, against heavy odds, so as to argue her jailed brother’s appeal) that one can only diagnose incompetence, for which, alas, there is no simple cure. Here’s the thing though: fiction needs to be free to take what it wants from reality and go wild with it. Xavier Beauvois doesn’t want us to imagine that he has solid documentation for the scene in Of Gods and Men where the monks form a semi-circle and chant their defiance at the hovering military helicopter. It’s one of the great scenes of the year; it would be if these monks had never existed. Knowing there are real people somewhere behind the film is important, but it’s not what makes the film important.
That, I think, is what Tony Goldwyn, who directed Conviction, and Pamela Gray, who wrote it, don’t get. Their film (I say “their film” because my sense is that the two of them are the primary authors of everything that’s wrong with it; this is a highly arguable point, film being the collaborative art form that it is, and I’ll return to it another time) is fatally undermined by the unremitting insistence that Betty Ann Waters knows her brother is innocent and she’s right and she’s a hero yay yay yay. This is an appropriate position for Betty Ann’s Mum to take, or for someone walking out of a movie which has gradually revealed Betty Ann’s heroism and won us over, bit by bit, craftily allowing us to flirt with the belief that Betty Ann might perhaps be wrong, might in fact be desperately, tragically deluded: this being the belief of every single person who knows her, her brother aside. What it isn’t is a good implied assumption to build into your film’s basic DNA, so that every last scene takes it for granted. I can see why you might do it, though: because you’ve met the real Betty Ann Waters, who really did fight a long hard fight for her wrongly imprisoned brother – her brother who, in a crushing stroke of irony, died in an accident a few months after he got out of jail, a detail the film doesn’t have the heart to tell us – and you want to trumpet to the skies how wonderful you think she is, because dammit, her life has not been fair. At least let her be the hero of her own movie!
This is one way films about real people can go wrong. Fidelity to the truth – because Betty Ann Waters was right, and she gave up a large chunk of her life to free an innocent man – causes them to make the truth strident, which makes it alienating, and to make it unambiguous, which makes it dull. Which is just another way of lying. Betty Ann Waters did not live a TV movie cliché.
In art there are no true stories; reality is always several removes away by the time you’ve made a film. Consider the Afghan war documentary Restrepo. It opens half-way through a fast-pan hand-held camera movement – a soldier is whipping his camcorder around so he can focus on a friend’s face. Why not edit out the pan and open on the soldier’s friend talking? Because it wouldn’t say “amateur footage” as loudly. The opening and closing sequences are the only parts of the film which use the soldier’s home movies; the rest is professionally shot and only gets that wobbly hand-held feel when the guy doing the shooting is himself being shot at, which is the kind of stylistic statement you don’t need to analyse too carefully. (Actually you do; the decision to use some of this combat footage strikes me as quite problematic, but that’s another conversation.)
Restrepo
There are a couple of perfectly good reasons why the film bookends itself with the soldier’s home movie. But think about that broken opening fast pan. It’s the very first thing we see, and it contributes absolutely nothing to the film, except for this message: “You are seeing something real”. In the grammar of contemporary cinema, amateur rough-cuts equal reality. Which is why hand-held cameras are used for key portions of TV shows like David Simon’s Generation Kill, a fictional recasting of an embedded reporter’s experiences during the invasion of Iraq.
Generation Kill is “based on a true story”; that’s to say, it isn’t true. But it’s a lot truer than Restrepo. I’m still in the process of watching the series, but I’ve seen enough to know that it uses the tools of fiction to go further into Iraq than any documentary I’ve seen yet: it tells us much, much more about Iraq than Restrepo tells us about Afghanistan. Restrepo focuses in tightly on a platoon of American soldiers, and tells us almost nothing about the country they’re in, the reasons they’re there, the people they’re fighting, or the people they’re meant to be helping. (It doesn’t tell us, for instance, anything about the complex history thanks to which many of the latter are probably also the former.)
The opening shot of Armadillo, another documentary about a detachment of soldiers in Afghanistan, shows us a wide, still landscape. It’s dawn. After a long moment, helicopters float into shot in slow motion. There’s something more than usually insectile about their movement – that’s a note I jotted down while watching, and I still haven’t figured out exactly why the done-to-death helicopters/insects metaphor feels so much more apt here than it usually does. Something to do with the slo-mo gossamer strobe pattern of the blades, I think; but also something wasp-like in the angle the helicopters take to the ground as they come in to land. It’s a resolutely cinematic image, calling attention to its own artifice: it tells you that you’re watching something created to express a point of view.
Or in other words, it tells you you’re watching something willing to use all the tools in the film-maker’s kit. The opening shot of Restrepo makes an empty claim to the status of “truth”; in a world where hand-held cameras are routinely used for fiction, deliberately trying for a rougher, less polished style when you don’t need to is not just an affectation, it’s a sign of nerves. “Honest, this really happened!” Better to try for a style that arrests our attention. Armadillo is a wilder, wider, more sophisticated look at the quote-unquote “peacekeeping” operations in Afghanistan than Restrepo by an order of magnitude, and part of the reason is that it permits itself to look and behave like a piece of cinema: it pushes us around, it takes the time to be beautiful so its ugly moments have some weight, it captures the logic of its soldiers’ emotional response to the country. We’re shown some of the causes of their slow-build anger and frustration, and so when they make questionable decisions late in the film, we can understand why.
Armadillo
Though exactly what happens as a result is unclear, and is indeed currently the subject of a formal enquiry in Denmark. Janus Metz, the film’s director, says of this controversial sequence that he wanted “to place the viewer in a position where he could say that it’s not even possible to know what was going on. Maybe the soldiers don’t even know themselves.” There’s reality for you.
Armadillo is a more complex document than Restrepo. It lets in more light. Anyone setting out to tell any sort of fact-based story should think about the gulf between the two films, because it’s the gulf Conviction and its ilk typically fall into. Good intentions will never save unsophisticated realism from feeling dull, simplistic, or simply fake. Armadillo, on the other hand, is clearly based on a true story.
CONVICTION, by Tony Goldwyn, showing now. RESTREPO, by Tim Herington and Sebastian Junger; ARMADILLO, by Janus Metz Pedersen; and OF GODS AND MEN, by Xavier Beauvois, all showing as part of the World Cinema Showcase film festival.