Artist Biopics, at their best, can act as perfect amalgamations of cinema and portraiture. Showcasing the best each has to offer, a feature film that explores the life and art-form of iconic painters, poets, and philosophers (often three qualities reside in the same subject) can enhance it all – from the first brushstroke to the finished canvas. A biopic can even do the extraordinary thing of reframing an artist to be the focus of their own story, transforming great observers into great subjects in of themselves.
The key, of course, is a believable leading performance that truly works – not just in seeking to understand the world through that artist’s eyes, but make the world see them back, particularly for the case of artistic prodigies unappreciated in their own lifetime. To mark one of the newest big-screen art-history epic – Mrs Lowry and Son, which is available on digital from 20th December, and on DVD from 20th January 2020 – here’s a look at some of the best screen portrayals of artists.
1. Timothy Spall as LS Lowry and J.M.W Turner
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTOiVivEmwo
Such is the case with the work of Timothy Spall in Adrian Noble’s take on L.S Lowry in Mrs Lowry & Son. The film explores not just the grim socio-political conditions that spurred on the productive fervour of Lowry’s bleakly honest landscape art but the relationship struggles he also traversed at home (the indomitable Vanessa Redgrave returns to the screen to, in turn, verbally spar and desolate her struggling son). As Lowry, Spall seems to emanate vulnerability from weary bones, signalling the drain that both the embittered reaction to his art (even from his own kin) and the class struggle that caused his to continue on, would have on the soul. It’s a brave performance, precisely because it includes fear – the fear that all artists bear in the pursuit of expression.
Before he was Lowry – Spall even took up painting himself in preparation to inhabit the loveable brute of British fine art J.M.W Turner. It’s one of the few bits of headline method acting that actually led to the creation of something beautiful, rather than the destruction of sets and co-stars feelings.
Spall has a career-defining knack for embodying the humble artist and, following the runaway success of his Turner, he has returned at the top of his game in Mrs Lowry and Son to shade in the spaces between character and creative characteristics.
2. Willem Dafoe as Vincent Van Gogh
The dazzling 2018 take on the last days of Vincent Van Gogh is not the first, or last, Van Gogh adaptation but it may be the closest to him in spirit. Painter and Filmmaker Julian Schnabel directs At Eternity’s Gate with the same sweeping approach as he has for his own art: by fragmenting the story and letting the raw, undiluted emotions of a teased and neurologically tortured Van Gogh burst out of the screen like smatterings of colour. Thanks to his anarchic spider-man villain and his work with wacky auteurs like Wes Anderson, Dafoe has a certain untameable quality that complement the film’s subject matter. He channels the core of Van Gogh: the ability to see things as wildly and generously beautiful while in intense pain, with wide-eyed, impeaching looking up into the cosmos.
3. Salma Hayek as Frida Kahlo
Frida, released in 2002 and directed by Julie Taylor, cast Hayek as the steel-jawed centrepiece in an energetic re-collection of the pain and passion in Frida Kahlo’s life, and the perilously thin line between both that she conveyed with surrealistic paintings that mesmerised the world. She proved just how disenchanted she was with that world’s infringement with her, often unlucky, fate. As part of playing a feminist icon, and the woman that had the dignified conviction that she alone knew herself “best” in a world that often tried to oppress her, Hayek plays Frida with a contemporary twinkle of sass and casual inflection– it shouldn’t work but it does. It’s all about the attitude, which Hayek nails, rendering first herself, and then Frida, as born again rock stars.
4. Amy Adams as Margaret Keane
Adams won a Golden Globe for her uncanny portrayal of a housewife in Big Eyes whose quirky vision deconstructed and transformed the muted suburban world she was trapped in, into a wonderland.
This is perhaps the only artist on the list who struggled to ever reconcile her own artistic ability.
In inspirational biopics such as Mrs Lowry and Son, Spall has the chance to channel his own admiration of the painter into the performance, as figures such as Lowry held tight to their own love and belief in the process even as the world tried to tear them down.
Keane is a different story altogether, which calls for a different, equally engaging performance.
Stifled by her own abusive husband, and robbed of her creative ownership over her iconic big-eye paintings, Tim Burton crafted a kooky crime caper – the chase to recover what is hers – and Adams is pitch-perfect as a nervous pendulum of a woman hitting notes of abject misery all the way to fiery yearning to hold her paintings up high and sign her name – come what may.
