There’s a certain perversity in the decision to open “fact-based” movies at the close of an election season. After months of political noise, facts have become something like black holes in our public conversation – rhetoric in search of truth.
Still, having been trained as a newsman, I habitually welcome films like Green Book, The Front Runner, Roma and First Man — stories forcefully based on real lives and real events. Fact-based movies offer an authenticity and verisimilitude (that ugly word from school) that are missing from Hollywood dramas like A Star Is Born. But the genre also offers its own afflictions: Films can be pedantic, or by contrast, aggressively ambiguous, and hence particularly vulnerable to critics. Pure fiction can be attacked as dopey; a fact-based movie can be dismissed as “fake news.”
The healthiest antidote to months of political noise, of course, is to avoid the genre completely and bask in vintage MGM musicals,...
Still, having been trained as a newsman, I habitually welcome films like Green Book, The Front Runner, Roma and First Man — stories forcefully based on real lives and real events. Fact-based movies offer an authenticity and verisimilitude (that ugly word from school) that are missing from Hollywood dramas like A Star Is Born. But the genre also offers its own afflictions: Films can be pedantic, or by contrast, aggressively ambiguous, and hence particularly vulnerable to critics. Pure fiction can be attacked as dopey; a fact-based movie can be dismissed as “fake news.”
The healthiest antidote to months of political noise, of course, is to avoid the genre completely and bask in vintage MGM musicals,...
- 11/8/2018
- by Peter Bart
- Deadline Film + TV
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