Watching a series of movies and biopics dealing with extraordinary individuals, one notes a ubiquitous and disconcerting tendency to debunk or diminish their rare achievements and remarkable characters. It is almost as if a spirit of envy or resentment is implicit in what purports to be a celebration or, at the very least, a neutral account of their accomplishments.
For example, the Netflix blockbuster The Crown delivers an entirely unflattering portrait of Britain’s brilliant and most effective prime minister since Churchill, Margaret Thatcher. It was Thatcher’s clarity and determination—her “intimidating personality and her complete mastery of the business in hand,” as David Cannadine writes in Margaret Thatcher: A Life and Legacy—that rescued the country from economic decrepitude and socialist darkness. In the Netflix version, however, she is portrayed as awkward, stumbling, and anti-working class, an unsympathetic and rigid right-winger.
Churchill, himself, in the 2017 film Darkest Hour, fares little better. The impression we get is that of a sometimes confused, insecure, blustering and at times comic character rather than a man of exemplary courage, masterful oratory and heroic stature who saved his country from ignominious defeat. Melodrama and sentiment usurp sublimity of achievement. Similarly, in the 2009 film Creation, Charles Darwin’s quarrels with the Church, domestic tribulations and inner torment receive pride of place over his world-historical discoveries that altered the course of an entire civilization.
Musical genius also comes in for the inevitable takedown. The 1994 biopic Immortal Beloved presents a caricature of the magisterial Beethoven, who romps about in fits of unhinged fury, childish indignation, indiscriminate cruelty and accusatory viciousness. The splendor of his attainment is largely discounted. The film is busy, as The Guardian put it, “beating Beethoven into Meat Loaf.” Ten years earlier, Amadeus depicted Mozart as a pixilated runt given to scatology rather than one of the greatest composers who ever lived. One recalls John Dryden’s wonderful poem Absalom and Achitophel, where he writes: “Great wits are sure to madness near allied/And thin partitions do their bounds divide.” True enough. Eccentricity runs in the family of greatness, but abject absurdity and puerile reductiveness do not.
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