A-List: Based on a True Story
By Josh Spiegel
April 23, 2009
BoxOfficeProphets.com
No, the biggest successes usually aren't true-story movies, especially nowadays; the most recent major true-story movie that reaped a lot of benefits was the number-one grossing film of all time, 1997's Titanic. Don't forget, of course, that having a movie about a sinking ship can provide plenty of action for moviegoers to salivate over. Though there's a lack of true-story blockbusters these days, there was once a time when many big successes had ties in reality. Lawrence of Arabia, The Sound of Music, and many more films were big successes despite being based on true stories.
Still, as famous and popular as a true-story movie is, that doesn't always make it good. Take The Sound of Music, one of the most widely loved and reviled movies of all time. Some people love the music, some people love Julie Andrews, and some people would like to stop hearing about the lonely goatherd and edelweiss, thank you very much. Yes, even the successful true-story movie isn't always good. This week, another film, The Soloist, enters the true-story canon. Whether it'll be good or bad, a hit or a flop, isn't yet known, but it may end up as one of the best or one of the worst. Here now is the A-List's look at the best true-story movies.
Apollo 13
This suspenseful 1995 film is still Ron Howard's best film; though I haven't seen his upcoming adaptation of Angels & Demons, let's say I'm not holding out hope for that film to head to the top. Set as the space race winds down to a close and the majority of the American public no longer cares as much when a few lucky men get to go to the moon, Apollo 13 is about the real-life mission of three astronauts - Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks), Fred Haise (Bill Paxton), and Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon) - and the arduous journey they have to make around the moon and back to Earth when their module malfunctions, causing the trip to be a race against time than an exploration of space.
Thanks in part to the uniformly excellent ensemble, also including Ed Harris, Kathleen Quinlan, and Gary Sinise, and the mounting feeling of dread that seeps through the first hour of the film, Apollo 13 is one of the more incredible recent real-life stories to come to the big screen. It's also a major credit to Howard as a director that he's able to keep the tension high considering how famous the story of Apollo 13 is to most people. Even those of us who didn't live through this incident know it just as well as Apollo 11 or Sputnik, so for the movie to sell the idea of Lovell and company not making it back home is a huge plus. Though Howard's gone to the true-story trough many times (most recently with Frost/Nixon), Apollo 13 remains his finest effort.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Many true-story movies should have the word "based" in that famous five-word phrase capitalized and bolded, with big arrows pointing at it, because they will frequently take lots of liberty with the truth of the story being told. Of course, in the case of 1969's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, taking liberty couldn't be helped. Based on the real-life tale of two law-evading bandits, the main characters in Butch Cassidy didn't have completely well-known and verified life stories.
Though the film, directed by George Roy Hill and written by William Goldman, is well-known for its famous final scene, as Butch (Paul Newman) and Sundance (Robert Redford) face off the authorities in Bolivia in their likely doom, the real-life bandits may not have died so famously. In fact, their bodies haven't even been found. Despite this, what makes Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid a great film, an all-time winner, is its New Wave-style direction, its charm-filled lead performances from two actors who'd go on to star in the 1973 caper The Sting, and its memorable action and comedy. Though it likely took a few too many liberties with the leads, this is a fun, entertaining, fast-paced, and all around enjoyable movie with only one flaw: introducing the world to "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head." Still, I'm a forgiving man, so let's move on.
Monster
In makeup from head to toe and giving such a great performance that the famed critic Roger Ebert said he didn't realize she was the star until the end credits, Charlize Theron made the leap from being a well-respected, if moderately successful actress to being all of those things but also an Academy Award winner. As real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos, Theron was amazing in this 2003 indie film directed by Patty Jenkins and co-starring Christina Ricci as Wuornos' sometimes lover. Though it's hard not to sympathize with this film's portrayal of the violent and confused woman driven to kill after becoming frustrated with her small-town life as a prostitute, it's also difficult to feel too much for Wuornos, if only because...well, she was a serial killer.
Still, that Theron sells Wuornos as such a fully realized human being, that she's able to make even just one audience member feel bad for her in between her murders is really impressive. Though Monster ends on an inevitably dark note, the film is brave in its depiction of a down-on-her-luck woman's life as a hooker. Though Theron's not hit the spotlight as well since this film hit theatres, we can at least appreciate this new side we've seen of her and thank the TV gods for letting her guest-star on Arrested Development, post-Oscar. I'm just going to pretend that we've all seen that show and this great character study and move on.
The Insider
While we're talking about the best films from a specific director, let's talk about Michael Mann, who's got another true-story movie on the way with this summer's Public Enemies, a crime drama about famed gangster John Dillinger. I'd say that his best remains the 1999 political/journalism thriller The Insider. The Insider is based on the true story of how a few dedicated people tried to get a major news and television corporation to broadcast the obvious truth of tobacco and how it kills people every day. This is a movie that could easily have been a moralistic diatribe against the evils of smoking and a lengthy lecture on the hypocrisy of the mainstream media. And, yes, The Insider is about those things, but it's not a chore to sit through. Bolstered by an amazing performance from Russell Crowe as the whistleblower who wanted to go on 60 Minutes to tell all and another of the great, fire-breathing roles for Al Pacino, this film is one of the more slickly entertaining dramas of the past 15 years.
Unlike most of these movies, there's more than enough firepower in the rest of the ensemble; Christopher Plummer is fantastic as famed anchor Mike Wallace, Gina Gershon is appropriately slimy as a corporate lawyer and Bruce McGill, in a cameo role, manages to rant and rave while voicing accurate hatred of tobacco companies. In a movie that's meant to be specifically about bringing down Big Tobacco, Mann fills the screen with camera tricks, great music, and everything necessary to keep the most impatient audience member's attention. Even though it was a Best Picture nominee in 1999, not that many people have seen The Insider, so if you're one of the uninitiated, see it now.
Raging Bull
And if you haven't seen this film, often touted as the best film of the 1980s (quite a thing to say about a movie that was released in 1980), read the rest of this column and then rent it. Raging Bull is one of director Martin Scorsese's classic films (along with Taxi Driver and GoodFellas), a look at the up-and-down career of boxer Jake LaMotta. Raging Bull is well-known for its virtuoso black-and-white cinematography, the gritty boxing sequences and, most of all, its lead performance. As LaMotta, Robert De Niro gives a performance that's so good I'd almost wager he's never hit these highs ever since. De Niro's La Motta is a brutal force, even to himself. I, for instance, have a very hard time watching his cathartic prison scene, as he smacks his own head against cement for nearly a minute; you can't tell me that's not his head against real cement.
De Niro gained extra weight to more fully embody La Motta; his dedication to the role is admirable, even more so since it actually pays off. I'm not trying to ignore anyone else here, though; in two breakthrough roles, Cathy Moriarty and Joe Pesci play, respectively, La Motta's lover and brother, and are marvelous. Pesci, specifically, is magnetic, especially in his many argumentative scenes with De Niro. Only an actor as fiery and forceful as Pesci could hold his own against the bulky and intimidating leading man. Raging Bull is arguably one of the best films ever made so if you're, for some wild reason, a Scorsese virgin or just someone who's missed this film...what are you waiting for? This is the end of the column, so go rent it!