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A hypothesis: biopics live or die by their depiction of their central relationship. The relationship doesn’t have to be good or healthy, but it does need to be compelling, and it needs to achieve a higher degree of verisimilitude than the standard movie romance. Which is not to say that biopics always revolve around a romance…
In fact, biopics almost never arrange themselves around a romance, in the sense of a courtship. They tend to revolve around long-term relationships, either work partnerships or marriages. This probably explains their strange hold on me: it’s somewhat rare for movies to focus on marriage rather than courtship, and it fascinates me.
Sometimes the marriage is more metaphorical, as in J. Edgar, wherein J. Edgar Hoover and his second-in-command Clyde Tolson attempt a sort of marriage-by-transitive-property by both wedding themselves to their work at the FBI, and never ever ever actually directly discussing their feelings for each other.
(There is, incidentally, a great fic for this movie, Bitters, Sugar, Whiskey, Orange, which captures their relationship in all its dysfunctional, unable-to-discuss-anything-important-directly (and therefore communicating through tiny gestures) glory.)
That being said, in some ways Hoover and Tolson clearly had an immensely functional partnership: together they formed the FBI as we know it today. Their place in that history make the movie the perfect vehicle to explore questions about ethics and freedom and safety and the modern state, but although the film gestures in that direction, it never really digs in. It’s frustrating, because it’s hard not to feel that making Hoover/Tolson their prime concern, the filmmakers actually chickened out on the truly hard questions.
In fact, biopics almost never arrange themselves around a romance, in the sense of a courtship. They tend to revolve around long-term relationships, either work partnerships or marriages. This probably explains their strange hold on me: it’s somewhat rare for movies to focus on marriage rather than courtship, and it fascinates me.
Sometimes the marriage is more metaphorical, as in J. Edgar, wherein J. Edgar Hoover and his second-in-command Clyde Tolson attempt a sort of marriage-by-transitive-property by both wedding themselves to their work at the FBI, and never ever ever actually directly discussing their feelings for each other.
(There is, incidentally, a great fic for this movie, Bitters, Sugar, Whiskey, Orange, which captures their relationship in all its dysfunctional, unable-to-discuss-anything-important-directly (and therefore communicating through tiny gestures) glory.)
That being said, in some ways Hoover and Tolson clearly had an immensely functional partnership: together they formed the FBI as we know it today. Their place in that history make the movie the perfect vehicle to explore questions about ethics and freedom and safety and the modern state, but although the film gestures in that direction, it never really digs in. It’s frustrating, because it’s hard not to feel that making Hoover/Tolson their prime concern, the filmmakers actually chickened out on the truly hard questions.
