Let us look at the writer. What do you see – only a person who sits with a pen in his hand in front of piece of paper? That tells us little or nothing?’ – Virginia Woolf, The Leaning Tower (1940)
There is nothing more dull than filming someone writing. Yet there have been some great fiction films that have focused entirely on the writing process, including Barton Fink (1991) and Adaptation (2002). Although fictitious, both based their lead writers on real people: playwright Clifford Odets (Barton Fink in Barton Fink) and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Charlie and Donald Kaufman in Adaptation). When it comes to filming the lives of real writers, there has been a tendency to downplay the actual act of writing and focus instead on their private lives. Either drawing parallels between what they write about and their lives, or how events serve as inspiration for their emotional inner life and its transfer to the written page.
Of all the creative arts, writing is the one that directors often find difficult to convey on screen. Films featuring musicians allow for performances and instant public responses; the painter, the resulting canvas: for the sportsman we instantly see them win/lose; for those based on the lives of film directors/actors we can see recreations of their work. But what of the writer? How often have you seen the clichéd montage sequence of writing, screwing up paper into balls, cuts to overflowing waste paper basket full of failed attempts?
Shakespeare in Love (1998) pastiches this familiar trope marvellously.
Here we will examine the lives of three writers, and four interpretations of their lives: Iris Murdoch in Iris, Harvey Pekar in American Splendor and two versions of Truman Capote in Capote and Infamous.
Iris (2001)
Director: Richard Eyre
Screenwriters: Richard Eyre and Charles Wood
Starring: Judi Dench (Iris Murdoch (old)), Kate Winslet (Iris Murdoch (young)), Jim Broadbent (John Bayley (old)), Hugh Bonneville (John Bayley (young)), Timothy West (Maurice (old)) and Simon West (Maurice (young))
Subject: Irish-born British novelist Iris Murdoch (Jean Iris Murdoch, 1919–99)
Screenwriters Richard Eyre and Charles Wood used John Bayley’s 1998 and 1999 memoirs of his wife, Iris Murdoch (Elegy for Iris, Iris: A Memoir and Iris and Her Friends) as the source material for Iris. By using these firsthand accounts of Bayley’s emotional relationship with Murdoch, the film offers a tender portrait of marriage and love, first, a writer’s life, second.
Iris’s publicity material announced: ‘Miramax is proud to present a film about one of the most extraordinary women of her time. With two of the most acclaimed actresses of their time.’ This statement makes no mention either of the film’s subject or the two actresses playing her. Nor is there any mention of what made her ‘extraordinary’. The poster image is striking black-and-white portraits of Judi Dench (in the foreground) and Kate Winslet (behind). Only half their faces are shown, making clear that these two actresses together make a whole.
Eschewing a chronological approach, with a young Murdoch (Winslet) segueing to an older (Dench), the film’s structure offers two parallel time-lines and Eyre and Wood’s screenplay interweaves the past and present (two narratives, fifty years apart). We see Bayley and Murdoch at Oxford in the 1930s/40s falling in love and their life together in the 1990s dealing with Murdoch’s decline into Alzheimer’s.
Her loss of memory, creating a sense of loss of one’s self, is central. It is a film about relationships, and the impact illness has on it, not the illness
per se. It is a film about storytelling, not the act of writing. The portrait of intellect dimmed is played out alongside the earlier timeframe showing a young and vibrant Murdoch, clearly Bayley’s intellectual superior. As a young man he cannot keep up with her. On a bicycle ride, Bayley desperately tries to catch up and hold on to Iris who tells him: ‘Keep tight hold of me and it’ll be alright.’ This cuts to the older Murdoch, following him around, nudging him, forgetting things until he shouts out in despair, leaving her confused. This is a film about people loving one another, needing one another. The fact that it is about real people (and one who had reached such intellectual greatness) makes the film more complex and more emotionally devastating, encapsulated by Murdoch asking of Bayley, ‘We all worry about going mad, don’t we? How would be know? Those of us who live in our minds, anyway. Other people would tell us – wouldn’t they?’
Kate Winslet as young Iris Murdoch and Hugh Bonneville as young John Bayley in Iris (2001)
Eyre shows them young and alive, but having seen their final darker years makes these earlier happier times all the more powerful and heart-breaking because we know how their story will end. We know their future (which neither of the young couple do) and we in their present, know their past (which Murdoch is beginning to forget) – leaving Bayley, a literary critic and writer, as repository of both their memories and chronicler of their lives.
The film was praised for its emotional content, and for not shying away from its narrative drive in focusing on the emotional interrogation of relationships:
[the actors] deliver fearless performances and bring enormous warmth, vitality and messy humanity to people who, as Murdoch says in the film, largely ‘live in our minds’. Dench and Broadbent tactfully evoke the abstracted nature of Iris and John’s relationship … compassionately, often painfully, portray[ing] the slippage of oncoming disease. (Hornaday 2002)
Its critics railed against the decision to exorcise the years where Murdoch was achieving greatness in her professional field.
If you only knew female writers from recent trips to the cinema, you might be forgiven for imagining that mental illness came with the job. With an understandable sense of dramatic priorities, Sylvia, The Hours and Iris have all taken more or less as read the dull business of writing books, in order to get on with the Oscar-winning suffering, and the awful pangs of love (with male writers being the likely cause). (Caines 2004)
Richard Eyre commented that Judi Dench, ‘brought to the film [an] incandescent goodness and decency’ (quoted in Tucker 2001). This may account for Dench’s success at major national awards. She has been nominated for seven acting Academy Awards, five of which were for real people, and fifteen film BAFTAs, nine for real people. For Bayley, ‘Watching the film was not primarily an emotional experience, but an aesthetic one. “How well they have done us,” I thought. Not how weird and even threatening it feels to see oneself and one’s loved one walking and talking on film’ (2002).
American Splendor (2003)
Director: Robert Pulcici and Shari Springer Berman
Screenwriters: Robert Pulcici and Shari Springer Berman
Starring: Paul Giamatti (Harvey Pekar) and Hope Davis (Joyce Brabner)
Subject: American underground comic book writer Harvey Pekar (Harvey Lawrence Pekar, 1939–2010)
Paul Giamatti stars as Harvey Pekar, who through a series of ironically titled comic book series in which he stars, became an underground cult figure and quasi-celebratory. Pekar’s comic book series
American Splendor and
Our Cancer Year, which he wrote with his wife Joyce Brabner, provided the film’s source material.
Pekar began writing in 1976, and published 31 issues plus two larger works including Our Movie Year, a collection of comics written (with Brabner) about or at the time of the film’s production and its effect on them.
American Splendor was written and directed by husband-and-wife team Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, whose previous films had been documentaries. Here they blend fact and fiction to create an entirely different way of presenting a life story, one that befits the most unlikely of subjects: a gloomy hypochondriac hospital file clerk. At the time of filming, Pekar was in his sixties, and had spent his life in the rundown Midwest industrial town of Cleveland, Ohio, working until his recent retirement at a Federal Department of Veteran Affairs hospital. He is a grey man, a forgettable and nondescript character. He is unprepossessing and unappealing in manner, appearance and personal hygiene. An obsessive collector of records and comic books, well read and articulate but not great on cleanliness or social interaction. We know this, as he has detailed his everyday life in minute detail in his comic books that are pessimistic and unrelenting.
The film focuses on the unlikely love story between Pekar and Brabner, his cancer scare, and their adoption of a teenage girl. Not much happens in the comic book, or in the film. But it is the way the story is told and the observations from the sidelines of the real Pekar and Brabner that elevate this film. There is an unpredictability to it, as there is in the courtship. Shortly after she vomits in his lavatory on their first date, she says to him: ‘Let’s just cut the courtship and get married.’
Pekar did not read the script before filming started. How do we know? Because he stops mid-way reading the voice-over for something to drink, and in interview he tells the director. It is that kind of film. The first time he is reading the script (or purports to be) is for the movie itself. His comic books played with form, so does the movie, using comic book aesthetics, incorporating animated sequences and split screen. In the comic books, different artists drew Pekar in different ways. The directors’ draw on these differing comic-strip representations, as Giamatti will frequently turn into a line-drawn comic version of himself. The screen is divided into boxes, thought and speech bubbles appear. Where there is temporal or location change, it is indicated in the top right hand corner of the screen.
Paul Giamatti as Harvey Pekar in American Splendor (2003)
For the majority of the film Paul Giamatti plays Pekar and Hope Davis plays his third wife, Joyce Brabner. Along the way we also meet the real Harvey Pekar, Joyce Brabner and a number of Pekar’s colleagues who he introduces in the comic strip and therefore into the movie, most notably Toby Radloff.
The film’s opening sequence sets up this collage approach with the off-screen Pekar commenting on the on-screen action of Giamatti as Pekar. Pekar’s croaks his voice-over, ‘here’s our man’, as we see Giamatti slouch across the screen, ‘Yeah alright, here’s me. Or the guy who plays me anyway. He doesn’t even look like me,’ he grumbles. The on-screen action then cuts to the real Pekar in a staged-studio recording the voice-over and chatting with Shari Springer Berman. The audience can then instantly compare the real and the performance, seeing how good Giamatti is at emulating Pekar’s poor posture, depressed demeanour, and how good the costume and make-up department have captured the look. ‘Who is the real Harvey Pekar? Who could be more real than Paul Giamatti with his shrewd comic timing and professional body language? Could the “real” Joyce and Harvey have played themselves with comparable conviction?’ (French 2004).
Pekar’s stories are grounded in realism and naturalism, and the film’s cinematography reflects this by working in earthy tones and sourcing film stock to complement the grey and browns (no primary or bright colours) of the Cleveland landscape. The documentary sequences are filmed in a completely artificial environment, a painted white studio space with vibrant colours, playfully subverting the usual aesthetics of non-reality versus reality. Here, the ‘documentary’ sequences are as much a fantasy as the core ‘fiction’.
The barrier breaks down and the real ‘characters’ cross the barrier to share a fictional space with their off-screen counterparts. The use of framing, so essential in the comic book, is broken through here. Pekar and Toby (Judah Friedlander) finish a scene and leave the frame, which is reveled to be a set. They walk to an ‘off-set area’ where the real Toby and Pekar are snacking at the food table discussing the various merits of coloured jellybeans. Another example creates is a curious hall-of-mirrors effect when we see Giamatti as Pekar leave a network studio’s green-room to appear live on the David Letterman Show, while Davis as Brabner watches archive footage of the real Pekar on a television screen.
American Splendor was firmly conceived and marketed as an ‘art house’ movie. Independent in spirit, style, budget and distribution, it was successful on the film festival circuit, winning the first prize at Sundance. It was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay at the Academy Awards but, although clearly a greater adaptation achievement, lost out in the Hollywood-machine to Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003).
The dichotomy of mainstream/art house was raised by Joe Morgenstern:
sometimes the question of which review gets displayed on the cover and which goes inside is less parochial – or arbitrary – than it may seem. This week it’s a reflection of the movie industry’s separate-and-unequal distribution structure. The conventional and exemplary Open Range is opening in more than 2,000 theaters across the country. American Splendor is wildly unconventional, sensationally funny and a brilliant achievement by any measure – it renews your faith in the vitality of the movie medium. But this independent feature is opening Friday in exactly five theaters across the US. (2003)
Excellent performances and a light-hearted tone helped to create positive reviews in both the UK and US:
By choosing a subject whose life and art are inextricable, they’ve made the rare artist biopic that goes beyond the dull march of events and actually illuminates the creative process. (Tobias 2003)
The film is very funny without resorting to condescension, but also genuinely touching in its desire to celebrate a man quite remarkable for being so very unremarkable. The killer strategy (crucial if the film is to avoid a charge of patronising caricature) is to have Pekar, his likewise neurotic wife and equally unglamorous pals pop up regularly on screen to comment on and be compared to their lightly fictionalised counterparts as played (brilliantly) by the likes of Giamatti and Davis. (Andrew 2006b)
Capote (2005)
Director: Bennett Miller
Screenwriter: Dan Futterman
Starring: Philip Seymour Hoffman (Truman Capote) and Catherine Keener (Harper Lee)
[and]
Infamous (2006)
Director: Douglas McGrath
Screenwriter: Douglas McGrath
Starring: Toby Jones (Truman Capote), Sandra Bullock (Harper Lee)
Subject: American author, screenwriter and playwright Truman Capote (Truman Streckfus Persons 1924–84)
Truman Capote himself appeared in two films, playing the central role of Lionel Twain in the spoof detective film
Murder by Death (1976) and a cameo (as himself) in Woody Allen’s
Annie Hall (1977). But he was primarily known as a guest on 1970s and 1980s chat shows, in which he increasingly appeared as a caricature of himself. Toby Jones commented, ‘I’ve watched hours of television chat shows where audiences squirm at his high-pitched voice, and wonder whether this man could possibly be for real’ (quoted in Christopher 2006). Truman Capote, as a character, has also appeared in two other bio-pics,
The Audrey Hepburn Story (2000) and
The Hoax (2006) and in the 2009 American television series
Life on Mars. In all three, he was played by Michael J. Burg. In a quirky twist of casting, Burg plays Tennessee Williams in
Capote.
Released within a year of one another, Capote and Infamous cover the same period of Capote’s life, the six years from 1959 to 1965 whilst Capote was writing In Cold Blood, a true-crime account (in the style of a novel) of the 1959 murder of the Clutter family. Capote went to the small town of Holcomb in Kansas with his friend Harper Lee to research and interview those involved, including Perry Smith and Dick Hickock who were accused of the murders.
The two films used different source materials that have resulted in differences to their aesthetics, narrative choices, character development and performances. Capote used Gerald Clarke’s biography Capote (1988). Former Time magazine contributor Clarke’s biography was admired for presenting facts in an entertaining and enlightening manner. Infamous drew on Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career (1998) by George Plimpton. It is presented as a sequence of quotes from interviews Plimpton conducted with more than 150 people who knew Capote. As Infamous was based on personal reminiscences of Capote by the people who knew him, this may account for its more affectionate portrayal.
In Cold Blood (1966) sold millions and achieved great critical acclaim, something that Capote was never able to replicate, increasingly appearing as merely a chat show guest before he died in a haze of pills and booze in 1984. Capote is not a character included In Cold Blood at all, although his very presence in Kansas for all those years affected the case. There have been considerable debates about how his involvement in the case may have affected its outcome as well as controversies that in the book he made up quotes and incidents that never happened.
The two films, although covering the same period, are very different in tone and style, and are full of contradictions. Perhaps contrasting their accuracy forms part of a greater understanding of the relationship between fact and fiction. Critics of Capote’s ‘non-fiction novel’ have disagreed with him over his emphasis and handling of purported events. Capote used fictional methods to embellish – some say fabricate – his reporting of the murders of the Clutter family. We may never know what actually occurred during many of the encounters between Capote, Smith and the others over that five-year period. Capote was never shy about creating myths to entertain his acolytes, predominantly New York society women, known as ‘swans’, who adored him.
Infamous shows this side of him, with more of his New York life where we see him coax his ‘swans’ into sharing their secrets, which he later uses as gossip fodder. The ‘swans’ are played by Sigourney Weaver, Juliet Stevenson, Hope Davis and Isabella Rossellini.
Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote and Catherine Keener as Harper Lee in Capote (2005)
Toby Jones as Truman Capote and Sandra Bullock as Harper Lee in Infamous (2006)
Capote was released in its original language in the countries that usually dub, in order to preserve Hoffman’s extraordinary vocal performance where he captures Capote’s strange high-pitched fey voice. Hoffman’s performance is austere and restrained, about which he said: ‘I was terrified to start with, because you don’t want to mimic him, you don’t want to just do a stunt, because the story is the important thing, so I knew that if I served the story, the character would could alive. I knew that when you were watching it, you had to be moved by the story’ (quoted in Colley 2006).
Capote is a film about the bond of trust built up between an interviewer and interviewee, and how this can be just an illusion. Capote became fascinated with Smith, and the film hints that he developed an infatuation with him. It implies that he deliberately supplied Smith and Hickock with inferior lawyers, as the only suitable ending for his book would be their death by execution. Once they hang, Capote says to Lee, ‘I couldn’t have done anything to save them’, to which she responds, ‘Maybe not, Truman. But the truth is you didn’t want to.’
Infamous initially seems lighter and frothier, the scenes in New York are peppered with sparkly wit, and infused with biting black humour. When Capote goes to Kansas to meet Smith, it becomes much darker in tone. Whereas Capote hinted at the infatuation with Smith, in Infamous it is made more explicit. The erotic tensions between Capote (Jones) and Perry Smith (Daniel Craig) unmistakable. Craig said: ‘There was never any self-consciousness about it. I always think that’s how a love story needs to play out anyway, because it’s just this friendship that starts growing, and if it turns into sex, it turns into sex; but it’s not like two young men meet in a bar, go out back and fuck. This is about two human beings really sitting down and trying to figure each other out’ (quoted in Hoggard 2006).
Infamous thus makes more explicit the homosexual bond between Capote and Perry. McGrath in the DVD commentary said, ‘I couldn’t even believe I wrote this [of Capote’s near rape by Smith]. The scene was so alarming and upsetting to watch, even on set – my palms were sweating.’ Capote is shown to be clearly enamoured of Smith, and his feelings are requited. He is clearly distressed when Smith is executed. Capote depicts the author as more manipulative, willing to say or do anything to get Smith to tell his story, even being shown withholding information.
On the subject of the two films, Craig commented: ‘My feeling all the way along was I wish they had put the two bloody films out together. I wish they’d had the balls to do that. I love Truman Capote, and I love
In Cold Blood so much, I thought, “You know what, whatever happens, this is worth telling. It’s worth seeing another interpretation of that character”’ (ibid.). Sigourney Weaver adds: ‘If the other film [
Capote] is like a shot of bourbon, then this is a glass of champagne’ (ibid.).
Comparing the two, New Yorker Philip Seymour Hoffman offers a more nuanced, oblique performance, generated through a muted screenplay that avoids graphic scenes in favour of a subtler approach and a darker tone throughout.
A tragic obsession pervades Toby Jones’s performance of Capote who offers a very different emotional performance than Hoffman’s. Jones says:
How do you humanise a character who is utterly extreme. He comes across as such a freak: the mannerisms, the silly clothes and the compulsive name dropping of jet-set friends. The hardest challenge was creating a character that people might actually want to care about. The great comfort of a script as good as Infamous is that almost every word is brand new. There are previous few borrowed quotes, and every single situation is imagined. No one knows exactly what happened between Capote and Perry Smith in the prison cell during their meetings. That’s really the whole point. (Quoted in Christopher 2006)
Adam Smith, in his tribute to Philip Seymour Hoffman following the great actor’s untimely death, writes:
Hoffman’s transformation into Truman Capote remains one of the great achievements of any recent film career. Capote was tiny, fey, and precise in his movements. Hoffman, superficially at least, could occasionally resemble a ‘70s wrestler on the decline [Hoffman was 5ft 9, Capote 5ft 3]. But, through a sheer act of creative will Hoffman metamorphosed seamlessly into the elfin wordsmith. The commitment to the transformation, to that strange, alien voice was total. An Oscar for the simple craft of acting has never been more deserved. (Smith 2014: 26)
Capote was released 30 September 2005, to coincide with Truman Capote’s birthday. It opened to great critical acclaim, as was Hoffman’s portrayal within award circles.
Infamous premiered at the Venice film festival in August 2006. Most of the critical discussions focused on comparisons to the earlier film.
Both actors offer convincing voice and style impersonations. Shawn Levy describes Hoffman’s as ‘note-perfect. The wheezy laugh, the pain of work, the prying nature, the cold eye, the self-obsession, the ability to perform and ingratiate and wheedle – it’s Capote you’re watching up there’ (2005) and Peter Bradshaw points out that ‘British actor Toby Jones plays Capote and certainly looks the part – more so than Hoffman. It’s a very good performance and Jones deserves his time in the spotlight’ (2007a). And A. O. Scott of the New York Times wrote:
Mr. Jones’s impersonation is touching and credible, and his notion of the character is interestingly different from that of Philip Seymour Hoffman, star of Capote. In general, Infamous is warmer and more tender … less a parable of literary ethics than a showcase of literary personality, and it is in the end more touching than troubling. The release of two movies on the same subject is somewhat unusual, and the arrival in close succession of two good movies that tell more or less identical stories, each one distinguished by real intelligence in conception and execution, is downright uncanny. (2006)
Further viewing
Becoming Jane (Julian Jarrold, 2007); Jane Austen (Anne Hathaway)
Bright Star (Jane Campion, 2009); John Keats (Ben Wishaw) and Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish)
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Julian Schnabel, 2007); Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Almaric)
The Edge of Love (John Maybury, 2008); Dylan Thomas (Matthew Rhys)
The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002); Nicole Kidman (Virginia Woolf)
Howl (Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, 2010); Allen Ginsberg (James Franco)
Kill Your Darlings (John Krokidas, 2013); Allen Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe), Jack Kerouac (Jack Houston) and William Burroughs (Ben Foster)
The Last Station (Michael Hoffman, 2009); Leonard Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer)
Miss Austen Regrets (Jeremy Lovering, 2007); Jane Austen (Olivia Williams)
Miss Potter (Chris Noonan, 2006); Renee Zellweger (Beatrix Potter)
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (Alan Rudolph, 1994); Dorothy Parker (Jennifer Jason Leigh)
Saving Mr Banks (John Lee Hancock, 2013); P. L. Travers (Emma Thompson)
Sylvia (Christine Jeffs, 2003); Sylvia Plath (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig)
Wilde (Brian Gilbert, 1998); Oscar Wilde (Stephen Fry)
