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Becoming Astrid
Oct. 12th, 2019 08:21 amBecoming Astrid is a biopic about the life of Astrid Lindgren, author of Pippi Longstocking (and sundry other books), which is an idea I like in theory which didn’t quite work out in practice.
The first problem is that her life just isn’t that exciting - or if it was, they didn’t choose to show the exciting parts. The movie focuses on an incident in Lindgren’s mid-teens, when she gets pregnant out of wedlock by the owner of the newspaper where she works, who is going through a messy divorce with the stepmother of his six children. She has the baby, has to leave it with a foster mother in Denmark while her paramour finalizes his divorce, and over the course of that wait she cools to him and they don’t marry after all, so Lindgren brings up the baby alone.
There’s not really anything wrong with that story, but at the same time, it doesn’t offer much insight into how Astrid Lindgren became - well, Astrid Lindgren. I suppose the difficulty of making a writer’s biopic is that there can be such a disconnect between a writer’s outward life and their artistic pursuits: a musician can slam their hands dramatically on the piano, a sculptor has to sculpt, but a writer may just sit there at a typewriter, and send Pippi to the South Seas without ever going there themselves.
The first problem is that her life just isn’t that exciting - or if it was, they didn’t choose to show the exciting parts. The movie focuses on an incident in Lindgren’s mid-teens, when she gets pregnant out of wedlock by the owner of the newspaper where she works, who is going through a messy divorce with the stepmother of his six children. She has the baby, has to leave it with a foster mother in Denmark while her paramour finalizes his divorce, and over the course of that wait she cools to him and they don’t marry after all, so Lindgren brings up the baby alone.
There’s not really anything wrong with that story, but at the same time, it doesn’t offer much insight into how Astrid Lindgren became - well, Astrid Lindgren. I suppose the difficulty of making a writer’s biopic is that there can be such a disconnect between a writer’s outward life and their artistic pursuits: a musician can slam their hands dramatically on the piano, a sculptor has to sculpt, but a writer may just sit there at a typewriter, and send Pippi to the South Seas without ever going there themselves.
