Biopics tackle life or something like it

Having played characters such as the Sundance Kid and Bob Woodward, Robert Redford knows what it’s like to evoke real life on film. But nothing quite prepared him for the stomach-churning experience of screening “The Motorcycle Diaries,” the new film based on Che Guevara’s youthful road trip across South America, for Guevara’s widow, Aleida March, her family and Albert Granado, now 82, who was Guevara’s companion on most of the trek.

When Redford acquired the rights to Guevara’s book about his journey of discovery long after the Cuban revolutionary’s death, he promised Guevara’s widow a first look at the finished movie. So days after the Walter Salles-directed film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January, Redford took a print to Havana for a family viewing. “I must’ve lost 5 pounds during the screening,” Redford explained the other day. “The widow is a very tough bird. She’s very protective of her husband’s legacy, and she’s very much the Marxist, so I was sweating bullets.”

Redford, an executive producer on the movie, was also worried about a certain other mythic Cuban figure’s reaction. Although Fidel Castro didn’t show up at the screening, just as Redford was leaving town, the dictator came to visit him at the Hotel Nacional. “He asked me about the weather in Utah and about baseball and all sorts of things,” Redford explained. “But Fidel is a shrewd guy -- he didn’t want to talk about the movie. He said he’d see it eventually.”

Is it any wonder Castro seemed wary about watching the coming-of-age story of his old comrade in “The Motorcycle Diaries”? If you were a once-fearless social revolutionary who’d ended up just as much of a coldblooded dictator as the tyrant you’d overthrown 45 years ago, imagine how you’d feel about the world seeing a film celebrating the youthful idealism of your old sidekick, who had the good fortune to die young and leave a heroic corpse. Put it this way: No one goes around wearing T-shirts with Fidel’s picture on them. That honor is reserved for Che, the James Dean of Marxist firebrands, who died an outlaw in Bolivia before he had to lock any literary dissidents away in a cramped prison cell.

For anyone who is still alive and kicking, it can’t be an entirely comfortable experience seeing yourself -- or your dear friends -- on the big screen. As a young reporter, I visited the Memphis, Tenn., set of “Great Balls of Fire,” a biopic featuring Dennis Quaid as rock hellion Jerry Lee Lewis. The movie was utterly forgettable, but I’ll always remember watching Quaid throw himself into the role, having apparently decided to try to match Lewis’ epic consumption of intoxicants along the way.

To make matters worse, Jerry Lee was not only alive but living nearby, within easy reach of the set. It soon became obvious that the aging rock icon was deeply conflicted about someone portraying him in a movie. One night Lewis played a club date in Memphis. When Quaid showed up, he made the mistake of accepting Jerry Lee’s invitation to sing a number with him. What followed was a better psychodrama than anything in the movie. Jerry Lee used the opportunity to mock and belittle the actor, clearly making the point that true Jerry Lee believers should only accept the genuine article, not a showbiz pretender.

Not every biopic has ended up in such a vivid collision between real life and celluloid fantasy, but as the media uproars over “The Hurricane” and “A Beautiful Mind” attest, it’s often hard to say who takes more of a beating from biopics, the real-life characters or the filmmakers. Nonetheless, from the earliest days of silent film, Hollywood has had an enduring fascination with stories about real-life characters. Every year, particularly as we approach awards season, biographical films begin to pile up like presents under a Christmas tree.

A look back into Hollywood history shows a host of Oscar winners based, often quite loosely, on real personages, from “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Patton” to “Gandhi” and “Schindler’s List.”

This year’s crop of award contenders includes such biopics as “Aviator” (Martin Scorsese’s take on Howard Hughes), Oliver Stone’s “Alexander” (as in “the Great”) “Finding Neverland” (with Johnny Depp as “Peter Pan” creator J.M. Barrie), “Kinsey” (about sex researcher Alfred Kinsey), “Ray” (with Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles) and “Motorcycle Diaries,” which stars Gael Garcia Bernal as Guevara and Rodrigo de la Serna as Granado.

Filmmakers are attracted to historical characters because they provide them with material that is not only mythic and inspiring but also tangible, the equivalent of a sculptor’s hunk of clay. If a screenwriter had created a character like “Erin Brockovich” or “The Insider’s” tobacco whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand, critics would have hooted them out of the theater -- but because their heroics were rooted in reality, they were accepted as plausible characters. Having a text, books to thumb through and transcripts to research gives filmmakers a creative comfort zone.

“As a storyteller, you’re always dealing with invented tales, whereas if you deal with history, you get a sense of reality and sources you can rely on,” explains Olivier Hirschbiegel, director of “Downfall,” the much-debated new German film about the last days of Adolf Hitler. Hirschbiegel says many of the camera setups in “Downfall” were taken straight from documentaries he saw on Hitler. “With real events, you can read about what you’re filming -- you can check the facts. But more importantly, you feel the events have a weight to them, because history matters.”

Filmmakers relish using real settings that give their story a frisson of authenticity. When Michael Mann made “Ali,” he shot as often as possible at the actual locales, from a mosque where Ali had spoken to Ali’s original home in Miami. Salles not only shot much of “Motorcycle Diaries” at the book’s locations, but he also retraced Guevara’s entire journey twice. For added authenticity, Salles brought Granado along when he shot at a leper colony Guevara and Granado had visited. “We had to go one hour down the Amazon, ‘Fitzcarraldo’-style, to get to the set,” Salles recalls. “And Alberto sang tangos all the way in and all the way back.”

Salles believes that tackling the project helped the filmmakers understand not only more about Che but also about Latin America. “For us, it wasn’t just an extraordinary adventure but a way of diving into our roots. We saw how little had changed. The Indians in Peru are still deprived and not allowed the land that was theirs, even 50 years later. Just as the original trip expanded Ernesto and Alberto’s understanding of the world, making the film expanded our understanding too.”

Of course, one man’s verisimilitude is another man’s fakery.

In recent years, a number of high-profile films have had their accounts of history lambasted by various debunkers. “The People vs. Larry Flynt” was so savaged by feminist icon Gloria Steinem that the film’s director, Milos Forman, was greeted by noisy protesters when he showed up at the Oscars. “The Hurricane,” which told the story of boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, was viewed as an Oscar contender until it was hit by a series of stories labeling it a falsification of history. By the time “A Beautiful Mind,” the story of troubled mathematician John Forbes Nash, went into production, its studio public relations department had assembled a presidential campaign-style quick-response team to knock down assorted Internet smears and damaging stories.

Don’t be surprised if one of this year’s films falls victim to a Swift Boat Veterans-style attack, whether it’s “Neverland” for sanitizing J.M. Barrie’s unhealthy obsession with children or “Kinsey” for soft-pedaling its hero’s acceptance of so-called deviant behavior. The day “Motorcycle Diaries” was released, Slate magazine published a broadside vilifying the film for romanticizing Guevara, whom writer Paul Berman excoriated for being a totalitarian who presided over the Cuban revolution’s first firing squads and founded Cuba’s repressive labor camps.

If the film gains more prominence at Oscar time, it no doubt will be subjected to more unfriendly fire, even though “Diaries” covers a period long before the Cuban revolution began.

If Salles’ film romanticizes anything, it is not Guevara himself but youthful idealism. It shows a privileged young man whose social consciousness is awakened by exposure to suffering and injustice, a transformation strikingly similar to what white college students in the 1960s underwent during the civil rights movement in the American South.

Movies can’t help but mythologize history -- cinema reinvents everything it beholds, sometimes with destructive results, as in “The Birth of a Nation,” sometimes with heartfelt inspiration, as with films like “Malcolm X” or “The Pianist.”

Today Che is a black-bereted poster-boy for fuzzy revolutionary ideals. Perhaps tomorrow, inspired by “Diaries’ ” thoughtful portrait, we’ll see him in a less one-dimensional light. When Salles took Granado with him to Cannes this spring, Che’s old friend was asked the inevitable question: What would his long-dead pal think about seeing his image on T-shirts and baby clothes at protest rallies and fashion shows?

As Salles tells it: “Alberto thought about it and finally said, ‘Knowing my friend as well as I do, he would be infuriated by countries invading other countries, by poverty and by drugs and the commercialization of guns and weapons. I’m not so sure he’d be infuriated by the T-shirts.’ ”