in the Kansas scenes. He stands as Capote did, with back slightly arched and belly thrust forward, and is especially good at duplicating the Capote voice and accent, which he masters to such a degree that he uses it effectively even in the softly spoken, intimate moments. (His costar Catherine Keener, who plays Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, has far less need to impersonate because Lee was notoriously shy and reclusive, and thus lacked a celebrity image.) Beyond all this mimicry, however, Hoffman’s portrayal is noteworthy for its naturalness and psychological nuance, which are worthy of the best Stanislavskian acting. In fact, his impersonation is wedded to a subtle psychological idea about the character. Largely through silent reaction shots, he enables us to see Capote’s mingled voyeuristic curiosity and fear over the murders; his growing attraction to one of the killers; and his cunning manipulation of the Kansas community, the two condemned men, and the publishers of his book. As Robert Sklar has pointed out in his review of Capote, the contradictions and complexities of the character are also shaped and shaded by Hoffman’s appropriation of typical Capote mannerisms: “In an early scene, Hoffman/Capote points his chin in the air, a movement signaling at once vanity and vulnerability. The actor conveys Capote’s conviction that his inner demons can be controlled by regarding the ‘self’ as a constant performance. It’s a life strategy that the film Capote puts to the test, and finds ruinously wanting” (57).
Capote and Infamous are examples of a subgenre that Thomas Doherty terms the “textual biopic,” in which “a foregrounded artwork becomes background to a portrait of the artist during the process of creation” (4). The textual biopic isn’t new (see Charlton Heston as Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel in The Agony and the Ecstasy [1965]), but recent years have produced a cycle of such films, all dealing with celebrities of the modern media. A signal characteristic of the pictures in the cycle is that the audience’s knowledge of and in most cases admiration for the “background” artwork functions as ironic counterpoint to a more or less antiheroic depiction of the artist’s psychological and professional conflicts. Cases in point are two films about Alfred Hitchcock that appeared in 2013: HBO’s The Girl, directed by Julian Jarrold, which concerns the making of The Birds and Marnie; and Fox Searchlight’s Hitchcock, directed by Sacha Gervasi, which tells the story of the making of Psycho. Doherty observes that the filmmakers “traffic not only in reenactments [i.e., imitations] of scenes from their host films,” but also “play an audiovisual mind game” involving intertextual references. The danger of this strategy is that Hitchcock fans might reject the reenactments as weak imitations; but even when the films succeed at the level of imitation, Doherty remarks, they “can only be pilot fish swimming in the wake of their great white sharks, a lesser order of Hitchcockian entertainment” (4).
The Girl and Hitchcock have a somewhat distracting effect because knowledgeable viewers are constantly in the position of judging how well the actors imitate their models. The Girl, derived from Donald Spoto’s gossipy book Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies (2009), centers on Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren, played by Toby Jones and Sienna Miller. Although Miller is an emotionally subtle and talented actor, for that very reason she lacks Hedren’s brittle, almost affectless quality, which Hitchcock used so well to convey repression in both The Birds and Marnie. Jones does an excellent job of mimicking the Master of Suspense’s accent, but he plays the character as nothing more than a sour, sadistic user and abuser of women, lacking even a trace of the on-screen charm and humor that made Hitchcock a popular personality. The situation is different in Hitchcock, based in part on Stephen Rebello’s The Making of Psycho, which gives us a likable Hitchcock. Unfortunately, Anthony Hopkins, who plays the famous director, sounds too much like Anthony Hopkins and is smothered by an all-too-visible rubber face. Ageless beauty Helen Mirren doesn’t remotely resemble Alma Reville (a woman unknown to the general public). Scarlett Johansson is appropriately bosomy as Janet Leigh but too voluptuously soft and rounded, lacking the somewhat birdlike figure and the mixed attitude of toughness and vulnerability we see in Leigh’s Marion Crane. James D’Arcy, who plays Anthony Perkins, is the most effective mimic in the cast but has the thankless job of walking in the footsteps of one of the iconic performances in screen history.
To my mind, a more effective example of impersonation in a textual biopic is Simon Curtis’s My Week with Marilyn (2011), which concerns the making of Laurence Olivier’s The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), starring Olivier and Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn has been impersonated on stage, film, and TV more than any other movie star, and nearly as much as any historical personage. A partial list of women who have played her (omitting celebrities such as Lindsay Lohan and Madonna, who have posed as her in magazine photos or music videos) includes Melody Anderson, Susan Griffiths, Catherine Hicks, Ashley Judd, Blake Lively, Barbara Loden, Sophie Monk, Poppy Montgomery, Barbara Niven, Misty Rowe, Mira Sorvino, Charlotte Sullivan, and Sunny Thompson. To this list we can add the more recent performances of Megan Hilty, Katharine McPhee, and Uma Thurman, who’ve played actresses competing for the role of Marilyn in a fictitious Broadway musical on NBC-TV’s Smash. But Michelle Williams, who stars in My Week with Marilyn (aided by a bit of padding and what I suspect is a rear view of a nude body double), is especially good.
Neither Williams nor Kenneth Branagh, who plays Olivier, looks quite like their model, and their problems are exacerbated by the fact that they not only impersonate film stars but also perform very precise reenactments of scenes from The Prince and the Showgirl. Williams overcomes potential reservations by virtue of her luminous beauty and exemplary rendition of Marilyn’s patented little-girl voice. Her performance of one of Marilyn’s singing and dancing numbers, which uses the same costuming and camera angle as the original movie, looks almost as if a double exposure of her and Marilyn would perfectly match. At the more subtle and realistic level, Williams gives complexity to the character, suggesting Marilyn’s insecurity and guile, curiosity and intelligence, and mixture of fear and pleasure over the power of her stardom. The film also gives her a chance to reveal that Marilyn’s show-business image was the product of imitation: at one point, faced with a group of admirers, she asks her companion, “Shall I be her?” and breaks into an openmouthed display of voluptuousness. For his part, Branagh gives an amusing impersonation of the actor who has often been regarded as his predecessor. He’s especially good at capturing Olivier’s theatrical and narcissistic eccentricities: the tendency to raise his hand to his brow like a gentleman lifting a teacup; the rising, singsong inflection of his voice; the melancholic postures and sudden gusts of witchy, almost girlish business. He even accurately reproduces the comic “Carpathian” accent Olivier used in The Prince and the Showgirl.
One phenomenon peculiar to celebrity impersonation in the biopic is that, because of the realist nature of the genre, it always takes a few scenes for the audience to accept the mimicry and settle into a willing suspension of disbelief. This is especially true when an established movie star performs the impersonation. Near the beginning of Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra (2013), for example, Michael Douglas performs a reenactment of Liberace’s Las Vegas nightclub act, and throughout the scene I feel a kind of amused wonder, thinking to myself, “It’s Michael Douglas!” The thought never goes away but it gradually becomes less intrusive, in part because the film moves from a huge public spectacle to increasingly intimate scenes, and in part because, as the story develops, Douglas gives a good deal of complexity to the character.
When a relatively unknown actor performs an impersonation, the effect of the split between actor and role is slightly different because the audience doesn’t know the actor’s normal “self.” An impressive instance is Christian McKay as Orson Welles in Richard Linklater’s textual biopic Me and Orson Welles (2009). This film imagines a single week in New York in 1937, when, through a combination of boyish self-confidence and amazing good luck, an entirely fictional teenage acting hopeful played by Zac Efron finds himself swept up into the whirlwind staging of Welles’s modern-dress Julius Caesar. The reenactment of events surrounding the rehearsal and staging of the play is flawed, giving virtually no sense of the politics of the Mercury Theater and too little evidence of why Caesar made such a powerful impression on those who saw it. And, when we witness snippets of the show on opening night, they lack the disturbing patterns of light and darkness and aura of
