How Accurate Do Historical Films Need to Be?

Journalist Christian Caryl recently wrote a commentary in the New York Review about the movie, The Imitation Game, highlighting many of the film’s historical inaccuracies that he feels aren't trivial.  On the contrary, he contends that the film cooks up a portrayal of Alan Turing—the gay, wartime, British mathmetician who is the film’s subject—that is so far off-base, it crosses the line of artistic license and leaps into a world of artistic negligence.  He writes that the film “not only fatally miscasts Turing as a character—it also completely destroys any coherent telling of what he and his colleagues were trying to do.”  The film, he concludes, sends an “extremely distorted picture of history.”

I was intrigued to hear Caryl articulately make his point last week on NPR’s radio show, "Worldview,” along with show host Jerome McDonnell and film contributor Milos Stehlik.  At the crux of the debate was this: how accurate should historical films be, is there a line that should not be crossed, and does it really matter?

Whatever integrity Caryl built up for the first half of the show—during which he skillfully pointed out the problems with The Immitation Game—was quickly obliterated when asked about Selma, a film that's suffering similar scrutiny for its portrayal of Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King.  Caryl admits that the latter film takes “a lot of liberties with the history, some of which I found a little tough to swallow” and claims that people’s view of Martin Luther King with be “strongly shaped” by the movie.  Oddly, Caryl still recommends Selma.  Why?  “I thought it was just a damn good story.”

So, presumably, if the makers of The Immitation Game had simply made a better movie, then the historical errors could be overlooked?

During the show, host McDonnell didn't initially let Caryl’s inconsistencies off the hook, and asked him why he was okay with Selma.  Again Caryl answered, “You know, it’s a crackin’ good story…The Imitation Game I think is a bad story. A stupid story.”

Hmmm.  I personally don’t care what Caryl thinks is a good story vs. a bad story, and I’m thankful he’s not in a position of determining which films get made and which do not.  Whatever valid points he made in his essay were completely erased by his own inane argument on the radio.

But more distrubing to me is the following remark Caryl made: “A lot of people nowadays get their history from movies.  It’s that simple."

Excactly where he collected the data to formulate such a far-reaching claim is unknown, but it must be a sad, sad world Caryl lives in when most people with whom he interacts are clueless nincompoops.  Who are these people Caryl speaks of whose intellects are so flimsy that a two hour film can completely mold their viewpoints?  It’s true that I lean left politically and generally hate the right-wing attack on liberalism as “elitist,” but you know what?  In this case they would be correct to cry foul.  How much more elitist can one be to presume that most filmgoers (but not Caryl himself, of course) will have their sense of world history shaped by a movie?

Caryl's inconsistency and unsubstantiated claim notwithstanding, the question still lingers:  Does any of this matter?  Do films need to follow a guideline and be careful to portray history accurately? 

I'll answer the question with a series of additional questions: Is Amadeus an accurate portrayal of Mozart and Salieri?  Did Oliver Stone and Anthony Hopkins depict Nixon accurately in the film Nixon?  How about the character of Thatcher in The Iron Lady?  Or J.M. Barrie in Finding Neverland?  Oscar Schindler in Schlinder's List?  How about Hitler in Downfall?  Or Muhammad Ali in Ali?  The list goes on and on and on of films that were not meant to be the final say in a person’s life, but rather an entertaining interpretation. 

In other words, artistic. 

Huh.  Go figure.

Caryl overlooks a few other important points:

1)     All art is slanted, be it film, photographs, paintings, and yes, even documentaries (I doubt even Caryl would claim that Michael Moore’s films are objective).   And funnily enough, a film like Zero Dark Thirty which some blasted for supporting the use of torture, I found to be a film steadfastly against torture.   What?  A piece of art can conjure up multiple viewpoints?  Nah!

2)     People are not as dumb as Caryl presumably believes.  I have seen Nixon the movie.  It does not shape my viewpoint of Nixon the man in any way, shape or form.  I have not yet seen Selma, but I gotta believe it won’t shape my view of MLK more than the words and images of the Man Himself.  This brings me to my last and most important point...

3)     Historical films provide a gateway for learning more about the subject.  I knew nothing about Turing before seeing The Imitation Game (which I quite liked, by the way).  I still know little about him, but I at least have the salient facts down: Turing was a brilliant, gay man who—along with many others—helped crack the code to the Nazi’s Enigma Machine and was later arrested for having an affair with another man.  Now, that isn’t much to go on.  But you know what?  Because of the film, I may now choose to investigate further so that in time I’ll have a more complete picture of Alan Turing, The Man, instead of Alan Turing, The Character

In that sense, we owe a great debt to The Imitation Game.

Let's allow filmmakers do what they do best: entertainment us.

A Modest Tribute to Wayne Disseler

My mom’s husband of twenty-two years died yesterday, and though words are never adequate to sum up a person's life, I’d like to at least pay a modest tribute to the man my kids called grandpa.

My earliest memory of Wayne is probably from 1992, when he drove me in his truck to downtown Milwaukee to pick up a recliner that I’d left behind at an apartment on Juneau and Van Buren.  This is actually a fitting memory, because more often than not, Wayne was helping someone.  He wasn’t happy relaxing – he wanted to be doing something.  As luck would have it, I was often in need of just such a person, both at my first home in Pennsylvania and again in Illinois, where Wayne helped paint my wife’s and my bedroom, build a broom closet in the kitchen, and insulate around the radiators.  Whenever he assisted, he was a master at handing me a tool before I needed it, like a gifted nurse to a surgeon, and now everywhere I look around my home, I see little improvements that Wayne helped complete. 

It was fortuitous that Wayne – despite having been raised outside of Wisconsin – was a Packer backer, often vocally so, for it helped solidify our relationship.  Wayne’s mood often rose and fell with Green Bay’s performance.  I have a funny memory from October of 1999, when Wayne and my mom visited my young family in Pennsylvania.  The Packers were playing Tampa Bay, and the Buccaneers scored a touchdown with less than two minutes to play in the 4^th quarter to take the lead.  In disgust, Wayne couldn’t take anymore and retreated to the spare bedroom.  And then Farve did the same thing he’d done in weeks 1 and 3 that year: he drove the Packers for a game-winning touchdown!

Wayne loved hanging out with my kids, and for many years my family flew annually to Texas (where my wife had lived years earlier, and where she had earned Wayne’s nickname for her: “Alice from Dallas”).  It was here that my daughter Sarah crawled for the first time, and over the years Mom and Wayne loved showing her, Jessica and Sam their recently adopted state, from the Kennedy Museum on a very blustery February day to the Stockyards on a very hot day in July.  Some days were more low-key, spent playing in the pool, enjoying Wayne's chilli, or playing the card game sheepshead, during which Wayne would harrumph about my mother’s poor play and accuse the kids of cheating when they took a trick.

I have many other fond memories, from our trip to Clearwater, Florida, to the time Wayne and Mom babysat my twins so that Alice and I could get away for a three-day vacation, to our seeing "Damn Yankees" on Broadway.  He was always joking, always loving, and always supportive.  My kids, my wife and I were blessed to have him a part of our lives.

So long, Wayne.  Peace.

Get to the End, Already

A friend of mine has an unusual (I’m avoiding the word I’d like to use) custom of reading the endings of books prior to starting them, thereby alleviating any unwanted tension in her life.  This perplexing habit contradicts my own insistence that endings of books, plays and movies not be divulged in any circumstances save for pacifying a blubbering child (“Honest, Sammy, E.T. is going to be just fine.”).  But I learned this week that there’s another exception to the rule.

Over the past several years, my wife and I have watched – or tried watching – a multitude of TV shows that we missed over the past decade and a half by not having cable.  Countless friends and family members said we “just have to see” this show or that show, and as our enjoyment of watching SNL and The Tonight Show kept diminishing because we didn’t understand any of the pop culture references (a cableless home has its disadvantages), we decided to catch up on various shows on Netflix.

We started with Six Feet Under and gave up after a season.  Weeds?  We lasted maybe half a season.  Mad Men?  We found it depressing and mean-spirited, which seems to be a trend in critically acclaimed cable TV shows these days.  The meaner it is, the better the critiques.  Downton Abbey:  yeah, sure, it’s well done, but it’s basically a soap opera, and I kept hoping that Luke and Laura would make an appearance to spice things up a bit.

But then we heard about Breaking Bad.  Surely this must be a show worth watching.  After all, everybody and their mother was talking about it, and I heard that even Charlie Rose was in the finale.  It had to be good!

Somehow my wife and I managed the impossible and went into the series completely ignorant about the subject matter except that it involved a meth lab.  And sure enough, after trudging through the first season and a half of unsympathetic characters, blood, murder and the unseemly underbelly of American society, I didn’t care one iota about Walt and his foray into meth production.   We’d finish a show – always expertly done – and feel kind of…assaulted, similar to how I felt after watching The Silence of the Lambs way back in ’91.

But here’s the thing: I watch TV to be entertained, not assaulted.   I guess I prefer laughing to ridiculous jokes on Scrubs than I do watching a man choke another man with a chain.  Call me crazy.

But I still felt like I needed to know the ending to Breaking Bad.  I mean, I knew what was going to happen: Walt had a terminal illness, for crying out loud.  One way or another he was !!!SPOILER ALERT!!! going to die.  But I kind of wanted to see Charlie Rose (does Charlie start doing meth?  Does he end up being murdered?), so, breaking the rule, I did what I had to do: I skipped half of season two and all of season three, four and five, and went straight to the second last episode.  Sure, there were characters I didn’t know, plot lines I had to catch up on, but I was able to follow things pretty well, and in the end, none of it really mattered anyhow.  I mean, Walt did in fact !!!SPOILER ALERT!!! die.

And now with the hours and hours of my life that I saved by not watching Breaking Bad I can watch reruns of Cheers and Scrubs.  Sure, I know the endings of those shows too, but unlike Breaking Bad, at least I’ll have a few laughs along the way.

Hmmm.  Maybe my friend who reads the endings to books first isn’t so far off the mark after all.