It's time to call 'cut' on biopics

They win all the awards and produce ‘career-defining’ roles for their stars. But do biographical movies hold great artistic merit, or are they simply decent impersonations boosted by Hollywood production values? Christopher Hooton explains his scepticism

Daniel Day-Lewis in 2012’s ‘Lincoln’. Seven out of the last 10 Academy Awards for Best Actor have gone to successful portrayals of famous men (Rex)

The first artistic impulse has always been to document. When early humans first put pointy rock to cave wall in the Aurignacian era more than 30,000 years ago, it was to draw animals they had seen and volcanic eruptions they had witnessed. When writing systems developed in ancient Mesoamerica several millennia later, they were employed to keep record of who had existed and when. The same goes much more recently with the advent of cinema. Among the first films to consist of more than one shot and tell a continuous narrative in the 1890s were a depiction of the life of Jesus Christ and a reproduction of battles from the Greco-Turkish war.

It makes sense that we would want to seize upon novel mediums of expression in order to create new accounts of the past and present. It is a way to make our little scratch in the universe; to say, “Hey, I was here once and important things happened.” What is less clear is why – and this seems to be unique to film, applying much less to other visual arts or to writing – we tend to herald acts of biography and historiography as crowning creative achievements.

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Lincoln

A verbose encounter of the wordiest kind ... The screenplay makes the issue of slavery its centrepiece, but sets it within such a long crossfire of backroom intrigues, political skulduggery and rhetorical bluster that actual drama looks ready to expire on the carpet.

Spielberg’s film will mean much to a nation that maintains a near-childlike reverence for the office of president, and it may well become one of their classroom standards. I don’t think it will be embraced quite so gratefully by the rest of the world. Anthony Quinn