biopic – Rating Frames

Bob Marley: One Love: A Basic Biopic that Never Really Hits its Notes

February 9, 2024February 28, 2024Arnel Duracak

Bob Marley: One Love preview screening provided by Paramount Pictures

It’s telling that a film showcasing one of music’s most audacious artists who refused to ‘play it safe’ is the exact opposite in its approach to capturing his significance to history. Reggae icon Bob Marley is just that, an icon, which is why Reinaldo Marcus Green’s Bob Marley: One Love (2024) should feel like more than just a surface level recount of a trailblazing artist.

Unfortunately this exact problem has plagued a majority of recent films that have focused on iconic musicians. Film’s like Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), Elvis (2022) and Rocketman (2019) are all guilty of playing it too safely when it comes to taking a historical figure and adapting their story from a fictional lens. These film’s all ultimately lean too far into accuracy (or their version of it) at the expense of deeper character drama, a nurtured plot and an understanding that every nook and cranny of the musician’s life doesn’t need to be shown (we’ve got Wikipedia for that).

One Love falls into that category where it never really tells you more about the subject beyond what a simple google search might. If we consider A Star is Born (2018), Walk the Line (2005) and even The United States vs. Billie Holiday (2021), all of these films said more about the characters at their core through the very fact that they understood how to tow the line between fiction (of which A Star is Born is completely) and utilising drama to create tension ––– and that’s all while never losing sight of the protagonist at their core.

Marcus Green’s film picks up at a point in Marley’s (Kingsley Ben-Adir) life when he’s already reached a level of fame that has him ruffling a few political feathers. It’s a commendable point in his life to start at (in the mid-70s) rather than tracing the complete rags-to-riches story like some of the aforementioned titles.

Kingsley Ben-Adir as Bob Marley and Lashana Lynch as Rita Marley in *Bob Marley: One Love* from Paramount Pictures.

After being shot in an attempted murder, Marley is advised to leave Jamaica for a period of time while tensions ease at the top. This is much to his dismay since his wife Rita (Lashana Lynch) was also shot and narrowly avoided death. It proves to be a worthwhile move, with Marley finding inspiration in the UK music scene after arriving in London, and eventually releasing albums like Exodus which were undercut with political commentary and offered a twist on the sort of reggae beat he had become accustomed to in prior years.

If there’s one saving grace in a film about an iconic musician, it’s the music itself. There’s no shortage of hits that are played throughout like War, Exodus, I Shot the Sheriff, Three Little Birds and more. Fortunately they’re not showcased in the same way as the hits of Queen in Bohemian Rhapsody where they were seemingly devised on a whim and almost purely exist in that film for nostalgic purposes rather than to propel the narrative forward.

The film rounds off to a close after some 95 minutes which is a silver lining at a time where most overstay their welcome. This film doesn’t overstay its welcome and will no doubt be lopped up by an audience familiar with and intrigued by, Marley’s story. Should there have been a greater focus on accentuating that internal dialogue and sentiment Marley had towards the political situation in his country that ultimately led to his performance of unity at the One Love peace concert? Definitely. Ultimately the film gets you to that point, but the result is more of a split, cobbled-together look at key milestones rather than a deeper dive into a man who united a nation.

Bob Marley: One Love opens nationally from the 14th of February.

Ferrari: Michael Mann’s Measured Portrait of Enzo Ferrari is one to Savour

January 16, 2024February 28, 2024Arnel Duracak

Driven, work-oriented men who struggle to balance the personal with the professional and are often trapped by their own desires has always been Michael Mann’s bread and butter. In Ferrari (2023), his latest foray into biopics after Ali (2001), Public Enemies (2009) and to a lesser extent, The Insider (1999), he tackles automotive titan Enzo Ferrari. A figure notorious for his desire to win at all costs, Ferrari fits perfectly into the book of self-destructive but purposeful protagonists that Mann has been exploring.

A perfectionist professionally but a loose cannon personally, Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) was a multi-faceted man, with his mind ever so focused on innovating and winning races but also ever so muddled when it came to his marriage and family life. Mann wastes no time in connecting those two worlds, introducing Ferrari (after a short montage of recreated black-and-white footage of a young Enzo behind the wheel) slipping out of the home of his mistress Lina (Shailene Woodley), slowly pushing a car downhill before jumping into it and speeding off. It’s a subtle introduction but helps establish what follows as a deeper look beneath the bonnet.

Where he’s speeding off to is his blindsided, somewhat estranged wife Laura (Penelope Cruz) whom he shares his struggling business with as well as a deceased son, Alfredo, whose death is a trigger point Mann continually comes back to over the course of the film to access that hidden internal layer that Enzo tries to hide.

It makes sense to ground the film to a particular moment in time rather than simply treating this as a by-the-books, cookie cutter biopic. The moment he chooses here is in 1957, with Enzo continuing to grapple with the loss of his son while living a double life with another woman and a second child, Piero. It’s a period in time where the Ferrari brand was at risk of collapse and the Mille Miglia race was a way for Enzo to clap back at doubters and hopefully, debt.

Mann is an expert at extrapolating key info from his subject matter, something Driver attests to in a Collider interview by stating that Mann’s characters “internal lives are so rich and so specific” and that “all of his notes are about character and internal life”. And Troy Kennedy Martin’s screenplay, based on Brock Yates’ Enzo Ferrari: The Man, the Cars, the Races, the Machine, offers enough legroom for Mann to build out the sort of bubbling tension that Enzo is harbouring over the course of the film where you feel that at any given moment, something will burst as it often does in his films.

Adam Driver is Enzo Ferrari in FERRARI, directed and produced by Michael Mann

As mentioned, the Mille Miglia feels like the Hail Mary for Enzo to redeem his brand, and across the film he tests cars around a track with professional drivers while reminding them that it’s a privilege to race in one of his cars. It’s in these very transaction-like conversations that his ruthlessness and hunger to win comes through, with Driver playing the Commendatore (as he was known) with a composed edge but towering presence as though he was truly a force of nature in this world. Not to take away from Driver, but at times his performance feels a little less accessible than some of Mann’s other characters who share similar traits but often have a more engaging charisma.

It’s in the more personal exchanges he has with those he cares about that the true duality of his life comes through. Laura matches him in bluntness, with the loss of their son evidently creating a rift between the two that’s left them stagnant in their marriage. Cruz’s performance here is up there with the best of the year as she plays Laura as a woman on the cusp of losing it, with her dark, hollow eyes and blank expressions evoking the rawness she stills feels for her son’s death and distance from her husband.

While the film is more of a melodrama in its muted moments, it wouldn’t be a Mann film without some thrills and spills. The racing sequences, including that of the track tests and the Miglia itself, are shot expertly by cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt with cameras situated in seemingly every part of the car except the drivers laps. The sound-design adds to the flair of the races and the sense of foreboding doom as the cars rocket around turns and narrowly avoid knocking into each other.

The closing sequence is one of the most confronting of Mann’s career and definitely of the last year, with a crash that kills nine onlookers at the Miglia. Sure the CGI feels a bit jarring in a film that focuses on practical effects for its majority, but the moment itself and Enzo’s reaction afterwards speaks to the coolness that he projects where things happen in this line of work and you move on, because that’s what winners do, no matter the cost.

Ferrari is in theatres now.

Oppenheimer: Christopher Nolan Casts some Light on the Darkness Covering the Atomic Bomb’s Father

August 16, 2023March 26, 2024Arnel Duracak

While J. Robert Oppenheimer’s name might be synonymous with the deadliest device ever created, Christopher Nolan’s latest three hour biopic, Oppenheimer, looks at the man behind the atomic bomb through a much more introspective lens without ever insinuating that audiences should feel a sense of sympathy for his brilliant mistake/s. Of course, introspection is a key building block to any biopic, but given Nolan’s ouevre hasn’t ever focused on a historical figure of this magnitude —or any historical figure in this sense which still isn’t as big a shock as not casting Michael Caine—, there’s understandably a greater interest surrounding this biopic if not for the simple fact that it’s a Nolan film, then definitely because its subject is one of the most infamous, and misunderstood, scientific minds ever.

That Oppenheimer was a brilliant theoretical physicist who was the victim of his own belief that man could be trusted with forces larger than them, is undeniable. But Nolan’s film isn’t just concerned with the cookie-cutter facts that you can pull from a Wikipedia page. While the film is based on 2005’s Pulitzer winning novel, ‘American Prometheus’, Nolan’s interest jumps from the key, often glossed over moments in Oppenheimer’s life, and interrogates them more carefully.

Nolan’s Oppenheimer (a perfectly cast Cillian Murphy) is a man struggling to be faithful, who is always in his mind, viewing every next move like an equation on a chalkboard. His relationship to theory stretches into his everyday life as he struggles to maintain meaningful relationships, always approaching life by the numbers and relegating himself to a disconnected observer as opposed to a practical artisan. At one point he is in disbelief that scientists overseas have figured out how to split atoms from each other (or something to that effect), stating that it’s not possible from a theoretical point of view (POV), and it’s through this sort of mould that he carves his Oppenheimer from — a man unlike those around him, an outlier.

**L to R: Florence Pugh is Jean Tatlock and Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.**

In this way, he isn’t too different from other Nolan characters like Bruce Wayne or Joseph Cooper in that he’s committed to what he knows, and does what he must for the greater good. His distant persona also affects his ability to build sustainable relationships, often pin-balling across various lovers and failing to forge a life beyond his commitment to his craft as exacerbated by a scene where he offers his crying baby to his friends as he doesn’t have the time to look after it (a selfish move he recognises).

Early in the film he’s encouraged to pursue his interest in theory and master it, and this is the point in his life that Nolan opts to introduce us to. And it’s in the early stages of the film that Nolan really portrays the internal struggle that will go on to plague Oppenheimer in the film’s later stages. He cleverly uses hazy, almost dreamlike visual motifs that equally look like beautiful stars and bomb fragments. These moments are some of the most thought-provoking as they provide a real deviation from the coolness and level head of Cillian Murphy’s performance that makes the character difficult to read — as though he’s got everything under his hat and under control.

It helps that multiple POV’s are being deployed by Nolan here in what is probably the most un-Nolan-esque part of this movie. Not only is Oppenheimer’s view of the world on display, but that of his early ‘affiliate’, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr. at his brilliant best). This duality helps build tension and allows the events of the third act to come together more tightly than might otherwise have been possible. Frequent Nolan cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoytema, shoots in colour for Oppenheimer and black and white for Strauss, further helping create this sense of separation through subjectivity and objectivity, ultimately adding to Oppenheimer’s unknowability and the difference in views that the two characters have. Whether or not this approach works in its entirety is difficult to tell from a first viewing, especially since it does tie events together, but equally throws one out of rhythm from time to time with the various timelines intersecting.

**Robert Downey Jr is Lewis Strauss in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.**

The most jarring instance of rhythmic intrusion is also the film’s best for the very fact that it’s the most speechless moment in the film. If you’ve followed the marketing, the controlled atomic set-piece (atomic in its own right) is where the full force of seeing this 70mm beast in IMAX really sells itself. By this point a lot of the establishing from the first half —namely around the politics of the Manhattan Project and the scientific lingo that will fly over most people’s heads— has been rounded off and Nolan finally gets to play with his own toys by unleashing the mother of all bombs, creating a spectacle that almost transports you to the New Mexico desert with the characters. It is really the punchline of the film, rewarding your patience by drowning out all of the noise in its countdown and the ensuing blast.

Whether or not Oppenheimer is the sort of Nolan film audiences are eager for is tough to say; there’s no tricky logic that fans of Interstellar (2014) or Inception (2010) wouldn’t wrap their heads around, but the film also sees Nolan at his rawest and most cynical, choosing to show a world destined to implode on itself just as it’s beginning to take shape. While The Dark Knight (2008) followed a similar path, there was at least the knowledge that its commentary was so distant from reality rather than a part of it. Yet in a film full of so many competing elements whether it’s the performances, the dialogue (which has has never really been the sweet-spot in a Nolan film as much as the moments around it are), the rapturous score from Ludwig Göransson, the staging of the key set piece or even the candidness of the story, there’s no doubt that like Oppenheimer, Nolan was all in on going big, and the final result is one that will stick with many long after the end credits roll by.

This post was originally published on SYN

Oppenheimer is in theatres now