example of a "single-minded" ad

So, when I watch a biopic I’d always try to test the film’s story’s strength by imagining it to be entirely fictional; or otherwise that it’s a fictionalized variation on a subject’s non-fictional subject. This way, I not only get to try a screenplay’s ability to hold its ground to those too dense to know the subject is a celebrity, meaning those who don’t have any allusional or referential background material, I also get to test its ability to focus on a singular theme. In indie B-movies this singular focus is almost always common wisdom, while in Hollywood blockbusters the emphasis on action all too often takes precedence over tight characterization and plot (and did anybody say theme?).

So, trying on this test, what if Jose Rizal the movie and character were as fictional as Forrest Gump and Forrest Gump, and were to be shown at Sundance? Would it be a story that will come out as something told well to its audience? Would it suspend disbeliefs or come out as illogical or unfocused?

Amazingly, one need not even carry a degree in creative writing to appreciate that there are certain stories – like, say, those Cindy Crawford-starrers – that simply seem to not mean anything either by reason or emotion after they end. Movies with wrong endings (the wrongness of which are often the result of illogical beginnings and/or middles that puzzle the human interest) get this judgment.

NOW, THE MOVIE Ray is a Hollywood production only a little less spectacular by Hollywood standards than, say, The Aviator. But it’s still a Hollywood production, and somehow I was scared it would go the way of certain Hollywoodisms when it tried to combine several focal points – the character Ray Charles’ guilt over his brother’s death, his addiction to heroin, his womanizing and irresponsibility streak, his musical passion leading to innovations, and his later suspiciousness in money matters. To some, this combine will find value in the acceptance that these five angles were relevant to understanding our idol Ray Charles.

To screenplay-watchers and lay judges like me, however, mere combines won’t suffice in biopic watching. A seam must be found for a singular message to come out, if only – as they say in advertising art – for impact’s sake. So, indulge me. What if the character Ray Charles weren’t a real person? Would the screenplay and movie hold water in front of a festival jury, for instance? Pardon me, but this is not to plea for a simplification of lives, as anyway even a thousand combines would still amount to simplifications in a simple mind. This is, rather, an appeal for independent artistic relevance. In short, this is a review not of how the movie about Charles was but how the movie will stand in a different culture, in this case the culture of fictional screenwriting ideals, especially as the portrait movie preferred to end with a resolution of a most minor element in the film, one about the racism issue not given much weight in the movie’s beginning and middle.

Then I saw a ray of light.

In this light, a fictional Ray Charles came out as an esthetic creation whose play-ridden innocent child’s view did not do anything to save his brother from drowning, an esthetic invention that remained a child as an adult, playing women and drugs and the piano like artistic tools that excited his childish mind, a childish mind with a child’s view that could not do anything to save his relationships with women and friends and business associates and chemicals. Fortunately, there were “mothers” in his life that did the saving for him. It’s a fictional character whose childishness is blind to the reality of whistling pots and burning firewood nearby but is awake to the sound of a cricket and bird a little farther off. Ultimately, this fictional characterization also produces a portrait of art and music (and perhaps even science and computer engineering) and all their associations with escape and childishness, in both these factors’ negative and positive values to our lives. At a review class, it may even be pronounced a commentary on the need to appreciate both art's crickets and birds and practical life's whistling pots and burning firewood, a dual appreciation our central character was found wanting.

But biopics aren’t fictional characters, you say. I’m doing something crazy. Historical reality is there, I only need to open my eyes to it. Reality is not art.

Then again, from a certain other light all perspectives upon a real person living or dead can be said to be fictional, and that it is our organization in a process of inclusion and exclusion that produces our version, our own little “gossip” surrounding a man or woman or child. Ergo sum, all biopics are fictional, and their esthetic organization in a process of inclusion and exclusion produces the truth and the lie that is the person. All persons. In the end, we are all truths and lies to other people’s eyes, if you’d allow a double now triple rhyme. All real persons are fictional characters, all history written just truth saboteurs.

So, if we follow this logic then there is no difference between the biopic view and the “fictionalized view” upon a biopic. So the question as to whether the real Ray Charles jives with the fictional Ray Charles of my probationary reading becomes moot and academic. And since all non-fictional views are fictional, then by the converse all fictional views are views of reality.

IN THE MOVIE Sideways there was this character at the film’s early stage that declared a distaste for fiction. He took pride in his position of being pro-nonfiction.

I’m a big fan of fiction books, and when it comes to movies I seem to have carried this preference for the fictional. But I really should check my tendency to reserve the better spots on my shelf for fictional pieces over and against the so-called biopics or those claiming to portray real events.

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