This month on Netflix I happened to watch two biopics about two artists, both based on novels, produced ten years apart, depicting men who lived roughly 300 years apart and who made two different types of art. I hadn't actually intended to do this but once I watched both I started to draw some parallels and make some comparisons - as well as think about how one could be so good and one could basically suck. Today I give you a short, badly written essay on a comparison and contrast of
Magic Fire and
The Agony And The Ecstasy, or "How To and How Not To Do a Biographical Movie About An Artist".
Magic Fire is about the life of Richard Wagner (whose bicentennial is this year, incidentally) made in 1955 by Republic Pictures, which by that time was on its last legs as a viable film studio. The Agony and The Ecstasy is a film about Michelangelo Buonarroti and his painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling produced in 1965 and starring Charlton Heston as the tortured artist and Rex Harrison as the warrior pope who commissions him to create the great work.
The difference between the two is like night and day. Magic Fire is a cheesy biopic which tries to compress the entire life of the most important and influential composer of music next to Bach and Beethoven down into two hours and achieves in telling us nothing about the man or how monumental his work is and how it affected all of the art of the nineteenth century and beyond. To director William Dieterle, the whole thing is just an exercise in showing how Wagner could be something of a vain egotist while making some pretty music and pining after a series of women, instead of showing how truly radical his ideas were, while maybe even showing some of the man's truly dark tendencies and his genuinely complex relationships with the other human beings in his life. This movie could have been an opportunity to show the paradox of the artist and the dichotomy between what a man is and the art that he can produce. But alas, Dieterle just gives us a shallow, melodramatic two hours of nothing. There is no dramatic point to this massive cheese-beast. The film zooms along from one point in Wagner's life to another - it all feels so scatter-shot. The actors don't look like the historical personages that they are supposed to portray. There are historical inaccuracies (a given in any historical picture). Even the music, which should of course be a highlight is arranged by Erich Wolfgang Korngold in a choppy "best of" manner which never even lets us hear a whole selection before it's off into another cornily played bit from another opera. Oh well, at least it was filmed on location in Europe so some of the backgrounds are accurate (and pretty).
The Agony And The Ecstasy attempts to do the opposite - give us just one incident in the life of Michelangelo and build a dramatic conflict and exploration of an artist around it. Directed by Carol Reed, this movie accomplishes what the last film does not. We are presented with real questions - what drives an artist to create? How far will he go to do it? How does one find one's purpose in life? How does the relationship of one person to another affect their work or vice versa? What is the true impact of our lives on this world? What the answers to some of these questions are of course will be up to the viewer which is the beauty of this movie - everything is not laid out on a platter and the viewer must find their own meaning. The direction and the acting are better, too. Charlton Heston gives a great account as Michelangelo, making him both sympathetic and infuriating, sometimes all at he same time. Rex Harrison is of course basically Rex Harrison for the duration of the movie but manages to portray both Pope Julius' violent arrogance and surprising humility in the face of true art and beauty. The interplay between the two is classic - this film works as a character study in itself in addition to the qualities I have mentioned. They even manage the illusion of the Sistine Chapel being in the process of being painted, which must have been truly challenging. The only things I didn't like were the tacked-on semi-romantic subplot (standard in movies of the 1950s and 60s but thankfully not overdone here) and the twelve minute art history lesson in the beginning. It's rather clunky and unnecessary - I know who Michelangelo was and what his major works were, thanks.
In the end the recommendation is obvious - The Agony And The Ecstasy is a classic film worthy of any Netflix queue, whilst Magic Fire should be viewed by die-hard Wagner fans only, and only if they feel slightly masochistic... while getting a few chuckles from it over how corny it is. And to all the directors out there not reading this I say: when making a bio film of a great artist, try to focus on one work or point in their life and how it affected them and the world and try to give us some real drama out of it, instead of trying to cram the totality of their life and work into a short time-span, making everything empty and pointless.
Ah, who am I kiddin'.
