I’ve been trying to avoid complaining about so-called “predictability” in films. I’ve found that that sort of thinking is generally reductive. Like, when someone asked Roger Ebert what film had the least cliches, he responded with My Dinner With Andre, a film that consists entirely of Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory having a dinner conversation, and even that has a TV Tropes page. But at the same time, I’ve started to have a negative view of what are commonly called “biopics,” and the simplest reason I can give when pressed on this is, to put it simply, that they’re too “predictable.” I promised over on NSS Reviews that I was going to try and resolve this little hypocrisy, so here I am.
In a typical three-act structure, there’s generally some sort of climax in the second act with the intention to meet two quick goals. The first is, loosely, to let the characters demonstrate how they’ve changed since the beginning of the story, and the second is, on a meta-level, to keep the audience from getting bored. Apollo 13, for example, has the “square peg in a round hole” sequence, while another space biopic, Hidden Figures, features the main characters slowly breaking down the institutional racism that surrounds them.
There’s a little trap there, however. The second act climax isn't the only climax in the film. To paraphrase the fictional Robert Mckee from Adaptation., the last act is going to be fresh in people's minds, and can even get people to forgive earlier mistakes, so make sure it's a good one. So if the movie's climax isn't as good as the second act's, it just comes across as poor pacing. Wonder Woman (which isn't a biopic but I've found superhero films can fall for similar traps, probably due to their mythological inspirations inspiring more stock story structure), for example, has a rather intense sequence where Diana leads a trench run on the way to taking back a French town, while the final act has a three-part battle to raid a German stronghold. On the surface, this seems like a fine escalation, but when the film throws a misguided twist at the viewer, followed by lasers that weren't especially well set up, it runs the risk of breaking the audience's immersion.
(In regards to “the misguided twist”, I don't want to spoil too much, but I'm of the opinion the film had one villain too many)
How does this relate to biopics specifically? Well, accuse me of judging films by their trailers if you must, but I've found biopics are more likely than not to be “safer” experiences, which means they are much more likely to fall into this kind of trap. But there's another reason as well. A reason related to the whole selling point to biopics in the first place.
“Based on a true story” is one of those phrases that can get people rolling their eyes. It's frequently meaningless, relying on names that might be recognized even if the true stories aren't. The Wind Rises, for example, takes very large liberties with its main character, Jiro Horikoshi that it's easier to read that particular film more about the nature of art and those who make it than a serious look at an engineer's life as war approaches (it also does the thing people decried Patch Adams for, introducing a fictional love interest and then killing her off, though Patch Adams had other problems as well). These “true stories” are naturally placed at the climax of the movie; people don't want to see Apollo 13 land back on Earth and then NASA faffing about for another forty-five minutes, they want to know if they landed in the first place. But with enough public knowledge, the tension of these movies is killed in the scripting process. People know how the story ends, so when movies like First Man ask, “Does Neil Armstrong land on the moon?” the audience knows they're in for a waste of time.
The solution, therefore, is to move the goalposts a bit. Again with First Man, the goal of the third act is to provide closure for Neil Armstrong's two major relationship conflicts: he and his wife and he and his daughter. It doesn't particularly work, as the daughter subplot is more or less dropped for over an hour until the final scenes make it relevant again, but it's a good try. Movies like Hidden Figures miss this, so when John Glenn finally goes up, the movie wastes ten minutes pretending he might not come down.
Look, I get it. I get why people like these movies. They can be really sweet stories and my heart's not entirely black just yet. Heck, I enjoyed a lot of these movies I mentioned here, even some of the ones I disparaged. But to get fully into a picture, I want to see some spark of creativity shining through, and it's very easy for biopics to not, so I tend to avoid them.
-F
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