Yeah, yeah I’m back, I’m back. After a quick vacation and an annoying stint with COVID, here’s three big biopic (kind of) reviews as awards season 2021 ramps up.
The king of two queens
Throughout its questionably girthy runtime and moments of Oscar-hopeful melodrama, Will Smith’s performance almost entirely carries King Richard. Reinaldo Marcus Green’s biopic takes a respectable swerve in documenting the origins of GOATed tennis champions Venus and Serena Williams by telling them through the lens of their father, and Smith’s loving paternal energy is palpable as a warmer spin on his usual winning charisma in the role.
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The unsteady, narratively bumpy story often stalls without indicating a clear direction it wants to take or a destination to reach, but the novelty in its focus on Richard Williams and Smith’s powerful emotiveness, sincerity, and charm anchor the film solidly enough to chug along to the end. King Richard rides fascinating waves regarding the man’s murky ethics and control over his daughters’ lives, ultimately popping with touching love in a story of a good dad being a good dad. That is, if you can forgive its exclusion of one of the most pivotal aspects of Williams’ character: the total abandonment of his now estranged first family into poverty. Sheesh.
Host of Christmas ghosts
I just couldn’t click into or connect with Spencer. Something about Pablo Larrain’s look into a fictionalized Christmas within the very real life of Diana, Princess of Wales almost felt exploitative despite the film’s deep compassion for her struggles.
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Featuring an excellent lead performance from Kristen Stewart, Spencer is exceedingly well made, and its ventures into more abstract, almost horror-style vignettes create a waking nightmare that brutally capture the royal’s headspace amid the inescapably concrete, grinding eye of the public, her uptight family, and a hideous marriage. Is it maybe too assumptive in its empathy, too prodding an examination of a woman who was already notoriously viewed under a microscope for all her life on Earth? Spencer is humanizing to the private Diana beyond her public figure, but in doing so, sort of becomes a fault of its own reach in understanding.
Irish Roma
Paired with simple, loving imagery, a smooth jazz score hits the spot throughout Belfast, thoughtful and nostalgic in Kenneth Branagh’s remembrance of his home and its past. An auto-biopic of sorts paying tribute to his childhood home, the film revolves around the exploits of nine-year-old Buddy, his parents’ turbulent marriage, and ramping sociopolitical tensions seeping into their neighborhood during the Northern Ireland Troubles.
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While sharing more than a few similarities to Roma, Branagh’s hand never gets as soberingly sullen as Cuarón’s, his film’s heavier moments unfolding through the hopeful eyes of a child rather than the stark harshness of reality. The director’s retrospective respect for his mother and almost superheroic admiration for his father particularly shine through, and Dame Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds’ lovely set of performances as Buddy’s grandparents further round out the film’s fantastic cast based around this strong familial core. There’s discomforting domestic drama between the impeccable Jamie Dornan and Caitríona Balfe as the parents of the house, but their downcast conflicts are so rooted in love and beautifully framed through Jude Hill’s mesmerically pure, pitch-perfect performance as Buddy that the narrative of Belfast is nothing less than upbeat, if bittersweet in its push and pull between family, land, and a chance for a better future.
Blue Blood Burns Blue Media 