Fallacies of the biopic: ‘Fearless’ and ‘The U.S. vs. John Lennon’

Biopics, in fictional and documentary form, are a tougher breed of filmmaking than many are willing to admit. The problem is that simply presenting a life worthy of attention can never be enough; a vanilla retelling of the tale is better left to history books. Artistry is involved, and one should be asking tough questions: What is it, exactly, about this person’s life that warrants an artistic piece? How do you believe this man’s life reflects on life and history in general? However, go too far in the direction of a “message” and you threaten to marginalize your subject.

Consider Jet Li’s “Fearless,” which poses the titular star as Huo Yuanjia, a legendary Chinese hero who founded a martial arts school that promoted restraint and discipline over mindless violence; his actions instilled national pride in China while the country faced Western subjugation. The trailers have been screaming at me that this is Li’s “final martial arts epic,” apparently an apologia for previous films, which have been seen as an incitement to violence, rather than a commentary against it. As such, the plot follows a rather pitiful biographical path, never really having the patience to stay in one stage of Yuanjia’s life for long, speeding past childhood naivete, arrogance, pity, redemption and martyrdom. Li is an actor of refreshing honesty, but his apparent tribute to an idol of ideals becomes cheap proselytizing; complete with about 20 different speeches about how power isn’t everything and—ick—yet another cinematic blind girl who teaches us all about life and whatever.

What was truly surprising about “Fearless,” however, is that I found my eyes rolling to the back of my head whenever characters lined themselves up for a fighting sequence. Director Ronny Yu is no slouch (indeed, few fight sequences trump his own in “Freddy vs. Jason”), but while the best martial arts films treat their set pieces with the levity of artistic dance and stuntwork—stuff that is rightly thrown into the same conversations with Buster Keaton and Baryshnikov—the integral choreography of “Fearless” is strangely subdued. The movements are careful, yes, but the film is edited in a way that almost consciously prevents us from enjoying the “money shots” therein; we are never allowed to savor any of the images. I am intrigued by the correspondence between the film’s oft-touted message and its rather dull fight sequences. Would that be the only surefire way to make sure that no one could abuse martial artistry—by deglorifying it to the point of disinterest? Li, you clever devil.

While “Fearless” suffers from a preachy message stretched too far, the opposite problem plagues “The U.S. vs. John Lennon,” a hagiographic documentary which gathers family and friends to wax philosophic about the ex-Beatle’s Vietnam protest days. At first it fancies itself as a Lennon biography, starting with a Liverpudlian childhood, but you can be sure that anything that involves Yoko Ono is sure to exclude most anyone else related to Lennon’s pre-Yoko life. That must be why Lennon’s tenure with the Fab Four is so limited — “bigger than Jesus” becomes “Revolution” becomes “I don’t believe in Beatles” within five minutes. It wouldn’t be so much of a problem (this is a film about the protests and subsequent backlash, after all) if the film could justify its own existence.

The truth of the matter is that so much footage exists of John Lennon doing his thing—he being a man who was determined to use the inevitability of his celebrity as a means of public awareness—that he stands as his own document, and film proves that it cannot understand that fact by its very being. Indeed, the film seems to understand little about Lennon’s artistry beyond face value, or at least, doesn’t trust that its audience can; what is there to say when you juxtapose “All You Need is Love” against scenes of young men entering the draft, or “Imagine” against actual footage of the war? Isn’t that kind of what those songs were speaking out against in the first place?

For those who can’t connect the dots into a modern-day allegory, interviewee Gore Vidal picks up the pen and does it for you: “John Lennon represents life, while Mr. Nixon, and Mr. Bush, represent death.” Perhaps the film conjectures that the anti-war movement needs another Lennon-like leader to pull it into something cohesive and powerful. I won’t be the one to argue with that sentiment; all we’ve got on our side in the way of popular entertainment is self-satisfied hokum like “Syriana” and, occasionally, the incoherent ramblings of Sean Penn (no, I don’t mean “All the King’s Men”). But surely the message cannot come from a source that barely has the energy to act as a Cliff’s Notes version of itself. At best, consider “The U.S. vs. John Lennon” to be akin to the short-cut retrospective of the era once offered to us by “The Simpsons”: a few clips of Vietnam, Woodstock and the Nixon presidency, strung together for those who weren’t there and those too lazy to seek out deeper analysis.