http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2009/dec/11/1
12/11/09
With the best will in the world, is it ever possible for actors
blessed with incomparable beauty to get under the skin of the homely
characters they play?
I can really only go on supposition, but I do tend to assume that the
life of the super-beautiful movie star contains less in the way of
futility and failure as those of we shabby mortals. There is one
thing the gilded screen god or goddess will never know, and that's
what it's like to be ugly. In fact, scratch ugly even the
experience of being blandly average is intrinsically beyond them.
Which, for even the most gifted actor, is going to be a hurdle in a
biopic of someone demonstrably plain.
On this supposition is founded the misgivings I've always had about
Howl, the study of poet Allen Ginsberg at the time of his obscenity
trial in 1957 which will debut at next month's Sundance festival.
Because, as shown in the still posted at the House Next Door, Howl
sees Ginsberg being played by James Franco: yep, the famously homely
Allen Ginsberg is portrayed by possibly the most beautiful actor in
Hollywood. And they've tried, you can tell they really have, with the
haircut and the rest of it. But with all appropriate caveats in place
about not judging a film I haven't seen yet, I will confess to having
a chronically hard time buying into Franco's Ginsberg and I say
this as someone who likes James Franco as anything other than a
hopeful pair of glasses.
Of course a healthy suspension of disbelief is a must for any film
lover, and mine's a marvel a deeply suggestible nature that's been
honed over years to the extent I can believe in Lotte Reiniger
silhouette puppets and the films of Val Kilmer almost as readily as I
can the laptop screen before me now. And yet the biopic fitted out
with the excessively perfect star is, for me at least, a near-certain
deal-breaker. The sleight of hand at the heart of cinema history
the unreal splendour of most screen performers is at its very
shakiest when Google Images can instantly remind you of the lank,
spotty, asymmetrical reality they're meant to be capturing.
And what's doubly strange to me is that, with notable exceptions such
as Nicole Kidman and her proboscis in The Hours, this particular
syndrome seems to affect male leads as much if not more than
women (maybe because, the culture being what it is, women deemed
deserving of the biopic treatment are often attractive to begin
with). Howl alone falls for it not once but twice casting Mad Men's
Jon Hamm as unchiselled defence lawyer Jake Ehrlich. And I can tell
you, those few straight women and gay men I know who don't on some
level want James Franco, assuredly want Jon Hamm. And if they don't,
then they do want Johnny Depp, whose fine performances as various
real people have always been subverted by the implausibility of a man
who looks like Johnny Depp meeting the same fate as, say, hapless
coke smuggler George Jung in Blow. And this is, I feel, the moment at
which it becomes necessary to reference Jared Leto's appearance as
John Lennon's killer Mark Chapman in the ill-fated Chapter 27.
The point, of course, isn't that an actor need look like their
subject in order to play them. Much as the biopics you like most are
often about people you aren't especially fond of (or were even
previously interested in), so it's a given that there's more to the
weird, occultish practice of conjuring up a real subject than mere
looky-likeyness. Witness genre staple Michael Sheen's non-resemblance
to Tony Blair or Kenneth Williams, or the lack of similarity between
Andy Serkis and Ian Brady or, indeed, Ian Dury his part in the
forthcoming Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, from which photographer Sarah
Lee's on-set stills already feel a good deal more authentic than Howl.
And I'm willing to concede that this may just be a personal blind
spot. But I can't help believing that if the biopic is about mining
truth from the subject's soul, then it's that much harder when the
schmuck in question has the face of a schmuck and the film star
playing them looks like a film star. For most of us, our physical
mediocrity is central to our identity, as it surely was for Ginsberg.
And while it's clearly possible to be (to quote the sage Derek
Zoolander) really, really ridiculously good-looking, and still be a
gifted actor, when the role calls for the ordinary, the excessively
handsome male lead can only skim the surface. Skim with great bone
structure, yes, but skim nonetheless.
--
Howl
Production year: 2010 Country: USA Directors: Jeffrey Friedman, Rob
Epstein Cast: Alessandro Nivola, James Franco, Jeff Daniels, Jon
Hamm, Mary-Louise Parker
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