ZACH TENNENT

Is it acceptable when historical facts are tweaked in the film industry?

I love fact-based, historical dramas — knowing that a film has any kind of basis in reality makes it infinitely more compelling and appealing. Zodiac, All the President’s Men and Born on the Fourth of July are some of my all time favorites. But the legitimacy of the connection to real life is not always so apparent and these movies all beg the same inevitable questions: How is one to discern fact from fiction? Where do we draw the line between the two and is it more important to make an entertaining film or an authentic one?

There’s often no real way to effectively tell what’s true and what’s — relatively speaking — bullshit. It’s also very hard to objectively gauge how accurate a historical film really is just by watching it — unless Mel Gibson or Kevin Costner are involved in some capacity, in which case you can rest assured it’s not accurate at all.

The appropriate stance for a history student would obviously be to argue that accuracy and authenticity are the foundations of any good historical depiction. I sat through Lincoln and watched a film crumble in front of me under the unbearable weight of its own exactitude. In cases like that, I’m almost frustrated to be educated. Just because Abraham Lincoln apparently talked like Grandpa Simpson doesn’t mean that it’s anything fundamental to the story at hand.

But the film boils down to Daniel Day-Lewis’ raspy, windbag monologues for 150 minutes. When you’re trying to depict a figure as praised as Lincoln with any kind of factual integrity, there’s bound to be a disparity between the flattering legacy and the unvarnished person. The only conclusion to come to from this, is that the real Abraham Lincoln must have been as interesting as mucus. In this case, accuracy is a definite weakness ­— and critics even complained that the film goes too far in glamorizing Lincoln’s story. Granted, Lincoln is already as appetizing as a piece of white bread dipped in a glass of warm water so I can only wonder what was possibly embellished for entertainment’s sake.

On the flipside of the Daniel Day-Lincoln debacle are movies that stray so far from the truth that the label of historical drama becomes dubious at best. From what I understand, American Hustle is essentially historical fanfiction. It’s a fictional story in which the principal players and basic storyline are derived from real people and events, but then radically altered and reconstructed until the film has nothing more than a veneer of historical context to it.

As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing wrong with this and the film makes no bones about addressing how far it strays from the truth. But why even start with a source story if you have no real interest in it? If the final product has an accuracy of say, even 15 per cent, does it even qualify as being based on something? Shouldn’t it be expected to stand on its own merit as a separate entity?

Maybe I’m putting too much thought into a movie that was basically an excuse to see Bradley Cooper with a perm, but these questions bubble to the surface nonetheless. The new X-Menmovie features the Vietnam War as a major plot point and Richard Nixon as a key character. A movie where Nixon meets Magneto certainly can’t be considered a fact-based drama, right? Yet how are his fictional interactions with the X-Men any more egregious than any of the unsubstantiated or fictionalized aspects of his life as depicted in Oliver Stone’s Nixon? If there are historical inaccuracies in Lincoln, what’s to say that it has any more legitimacy than Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter?

This all brings me back to my original question: where’s the line? How much creative freedom is warranted when adapting actual historical stories and when is the concept of accuracy no longer valid? The answer has to be to always assume the worst. Question everything until you can confirm it and never be fooled into thinking that watching Pearl Harbor makes you an authority on the Second World War or that watching Braveheart makes you an authority on anything.

If you’re looking to inform yourself on historical issues or events, there are bound to be plenty of informative books at the library. If you want to be entertained by an embellished depiction of true events, by all means do that too, but maybe just take it with a grain of salt.

—

Photo: Katherine Fedoroff