Whose Story Does the Kennedy Biopic Really Tell?

This Sunday, April 3 (at 8:00pm), after a protracted delay, the niche cable movie channel Reelz Network will rescue the controversial miniseries on America's most famous ruling-class family that was commissioned and then rejected by The History Channel, The Kennedys. (It competes with the launch of another buzzworthy and far more critically acclaimed miniseries, AMC's The Killing, which we'll be autopsying here at the FrumForum soon.)

With The Kennedys, the fur was flying among critics and journalists from the very start.  Tim Goodman of The Hollywood Reporter judged it a "dull, unwatchable, ham-fisted mess".  John Griffiths, in this point/counterpoint, said that it was a Dynasty-style camp sudser no more appropriate for The History Channel than Grey's Anatomy would be for Discovery Health.  In the film's defense, writer-producers Joel Surnow and Stephen Kronish (both late of 24) stepped up in this New York Times feature Q&A.

To me as a critic and historian, the controversy around the miniseries – and what it says about "what becomes our legends most" – is far more intriguing than anything that will be on the screen.  One need look back only a few months to the Oscar nominated big-screen "biopic" of sorts, The Social Network – more specifically, to Aaron Sorkin's liberty-taking screenplay – for a perfect example.

When Sorkin adapted Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires, he wasn't really interested in writing a second biography of Mark Zuckerberg, Actual Human Being.  He was interested in using the most prominent human symbol of the Internet as a metaphor for the massive changes in society, human relationships, and even the economy (bye-bye Borders and Blockbuster) wrought by the Internet's transformation into a tweeting, file-sharing Social Network.  And while turning real people's lives into fiction may be vaguely immoral (although in our cynical times, James Frey and "J.T. LeRoy" even tried to do it for themselves), the point Sorkin was trying to get across was indeed far more meaningful and relevant to our lives than a straight-ahead biography would have been.

Likewise, when it comes to true, stood-the-test-of-time icons, there are actually two Ronald Reagans, two Franklin Roosevelts, two John F. Kennedys, and so on. There's the people that they actually were, and the myths that they symbolize and represent.  (And the old joke among writers has always been, if it's a choice between the truth and the legend, print the legend.)

Of course, the comparisons to Showtime's 2003 miniseries The Reagans have been inevitable.  In its most controversial scene, Reagan opines to himself and Nancy that AIDS was "God's judgment" on gays.  In actuality, it's likely Reagan's indifference to AIDS was more out of fear of Religious Right voter backlash than it was out of his own personal convictions. (Remember all those pictures of the alleged homophobe-in-chief "palling around" with Rock Hudson, Merv Griffin, Liberace, Halston, and Bob Mackie?) But this truth is a little inconvenient for a time-compressed screenwriter, even if he were sympathetic to our Ronnie.  So they do what screenwriters and directors have done from the beginning of biopics – write it in metaphoric shorthand.

For an even more extreme example of the dangers of examining our icons too closely (or truthfully), there was another CBS miniseries a few years back that portrayed the early years of Adolf Hitler, and attracted almost as much controversy.  In all likelihood, the grotesque abuse little Adolf endured from his hateful father did lead directly to the crimes he ended up perpetrating later in life. But if we do explain him, does that mean what he did will inevitably be explained away? Made to seem somehow understandable – or even excusable?

And on the opposite side of the street, imagine someone trying to do a warts-and-all, straightforward biography of say, Martin Luther King or Mother Teresa. Such attempts have been made in books (most notably Christopher Hitchens' look at the latter), and even those were controversial in the extreme.  Perhaps treating icons on that level like mere mortals, indeed, reducing them to mere regular folk, does something of a disservice to the singular and unique accomplishments of their lives.

Maybe that's why, as a rule, the best screen bios of real people don't bite off too much than they can chew in a two-hour movie, or even a four, six, or eight-hour miniseries.  Think of The King's Speech, The Queen, Frost/Nixon, (or if you want to reach back, Anne of the Thousand Days or The Rose.) Instead of trying to show someone's (or some family's) whole life from cradle to grave, the writers and directors choose one seminal moment, one definitive and specific time frame, for our subjects, and use it as an orchestra-playing metaphor for the whole of what they thought and how they lived their lives. The best biographies that did span the decades –Ray, the BBC productions of Elizabeth R or The Six Wives of Henry VIII – moved swiftly and wasted few words.

So as I tune in to check out The Kennedys, I'm not expecting to see the truth, nor am I hoping to see the myth.  My real viewing fun will come from watching to see which side will win out in the end.

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