The movies just love, love, love history. But history does not love the movies back. Not even one little bit.
Movies based on or re-creating the past have been a cinematic staple since the earliest days of silent film, with stage great Sarah Bernhardt, for instance, playing Queen Elizabeth I as far back as a 1912 star vehicle.
I don’t know what the reaction of concerned citizens was a century ago, but if “Queen Elizabeth” were to come out today, historians, academics and other interested parties would be all over it like white on rice.
That’s what happened recently when, just a few days after Ava DuVernay’s “Selma” appeared in theaters, the New York Times reported, on its august front page, no less, that Joseph A. Califano Jr., a former top aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson, had “accused the filmmakers of deliberately ignoring the historical record” in their depiction of the tumultuous relationship between the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and LBJ.
That wail of complaint is just one of a series that appear with some regularity these days. No one can have forgotten, for instance, how members of the U.S. Senate, a group not previously known for its critical acumen, gave “Zero Dark Thirty” and its depiction of torture in the pursuit of Osama bin Laden a lot of grief.
Even further back, the makers of “The Hurricane,” a Denzel Washington-starring biopic about Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, were castigated for their interpretation of the late boxer’s life. I even heard strident complaining that Michael Winterbottom’s austere “Welcome to Sarajevo” had placed key events in that beleaguered city in the wrong hotel. Really.
These types of complaints can hurt a film, especially at Oscar time. “Selma’s” paltry nomination count of two may have been a result of the fuss, but I hope it wasn’t. And that’s not because I know whether “Selma” got it right or not (I don’t) or because I don’t believe films should attempt to be as accurate as they can (I do).
Rather, I think people who are as shocked as Capt. Louis Renault was to discover gambling in “Casablanca” when they find errors in films are missing the point. And that’s because of something I learned quite some time ago when an event I was tangentially involved in became the subject of a major motion picture. The event was Watergate, the film “All the President’s Men.”
No, I was not Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s silent partner, but I was a reporter for the Washington Post while the story unfolded, and all the major journalistic players were people I knew. This was, thankfully, as close as I was going to get to having a movie about my life.
I vividly remember sitting in the Kennedy Center for the film’s 1976 world premiere and watching as Dustin Hoffman’s Bernstein called someone for a comment and got an angry hang-up as a response. Wow, my initial thought was, how exciting, how thrilling to get hung up on in pursuit of the truth.
Then, a moment later, reality hit me. Wait a minute, I realized, you’ve been in that situation, you’re a Washington Post reporter and you’ve been hung up on in that very newsroom. And there’s nothing even remotely exciting about it. It’s as painful and unpleasant an experience as a journalist can have.
Those connected moments made me realize that film by its very big-screen nature inevitably glamorizes and mythologizes. Even when it’s trying its hardest to be accurate and low key, as “All the President’s Man” definitely did, it’s going to be wide of the mark because of the intrinsic nature of the medium.
