Besson’s Fifth

Until recently, I was not aware of a Luc Besson sci-fi epic called The Fifth Element. Then, while listening to a local radio quiz program, I heard this flick enthusiastically mentioned. The premise of Go Fact Yourself is that each contestant chooses several areas of expertise, then is quizzed in detail about one of them. A recent contestant selected this film, praising it for getting her family through the stay-at-home months of the pandemic. Though science fiction is hardly my favorite genre, her passion for The Fifth Element got me interested. And I become even more so when a youngish friend admitted to having seen the film, during his growing-up years, at least six times.

 Besson, French-born, earned his spurs in the film industry via action hits like 1990’s La Femme Nikita. He released the (mostly) English-language The Fifth Element in 1997, using primarily American and British actors. Obviously it has attracted serious fans, but many critics were not impressed. In Variety, Todd McCarthy called it “a largely misfired European attempt to make an American-style sci-fi spectacular.” David Edelstein of Slate was even more emphatic: “"It may or may not be the worst movie ever made, but it is one of the most unhinged."^[

 Well, yes. With its comic-book sensibility, The Fifth Element may be wonderful to look at, but don’t expect it to make any sense. There are deeply mysterious scenes set (à la the Indiana Jones adventures) in a remote desert cavern, as well as glimpses of 23^rd century New York City, where taxicabs fly through the air, dodging gigantic office towers. In the middle of all of this is the effortlessly macho Bruce Willis as a sadsack cab driver who used to be a major in Earth’s Special Forces. Also on hand is the always interesting Gary Oldman as the sinister industrialist Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg.  Despite his very French given name, he speaks with a hushpuppies-and-magnolias accent, like that of Daniel Craig’s Detective Benoit Blanc in Knives Out, leaving me to wonder if distinguished British actors have a thing for the Deep South. Ian Holm is around as an enigmatic priest, as is Chris Tucker as an ultra-flamboyant talk show host.

 And we can hardly forget the Ukraine-born Milla Jovovich, playing a sort of outer-space creation who speaks no earthly language and wears very few clothes. She is, I’ve got to say, exactly the sort of symbolic extraterrestrial that a teenage boy might invent. Which makes sense, because Besson apparently dreamed up this entire story at age sixteen, although he had to wait twenty-two years to put it on  the big screen. The few females who populate the film—playing mostly flight attendants and MacDonalds employees—barely speak, but they have fabulous bodies set off by suggestively revealing costumes. (There’s only one woman with any real clout, and she’s a “big bruiser” type archly named Major Iceborg.)

 The Fifth Element is a great movie to watch on a widescreen TV in the wee hours. The plot hardly matters, verbal wit is rare, and if you drift off to sleep you basically won’t miss much. Suffice it to say that in this film the world is on the brink of disaster, but it all ends as happily as you would expect, with Willis and Jovovich pairing up to lead the heroics. Just exactly what a sixteen-year-old boy would want.

.Speaking of which, this is the second film I’ve recently seen in which the director ended up canoodling with the leading lady in real life. Which perhaps tells you something about directors.

 

Biography at the Movies

I’ll soon be taking a bite of the Big Apple. The occasion is the annual conference of Biographers International Organization, a group that came into being to serve the needs of both active biographers and those interested in the field of biography. Since 2010 there have been (in addition to regular newsletters and Zoom events) annual BIO conferences, mostly in New York City but sometimes in outposts like Boston, DC, Richmond, and even Los Angeles. Some attendees merely want advice on telling family stories; others are experienced writers and even recipients of major awards. My BIO pal Amanda Vaill just won this year’s Pulitzer for Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution.

 I don’t know if there’s any hope of Angelica and Elizabeth Schuyler showing up at the movies anytime soon. (The fact that they’re both major figures in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton might surely get producer-types interested.) But I do know there’s a long tradition of concocting films about famous historical figures. Decades ago, it was considered acceptable to wrestle the biographical facts about a celebrity —whether a composer, a scientist, or a politician—to conform to Hollywood’s idea of an inspiring life story. Now I’d like to think we’re trying harder to be true to actual reality. But in any case, actors love portraying great figures of the past. If you look at lists of Oscar-winning performances, you’ll note there’s a lot of Academy love for stars able to get under the skin of the real people who helped create our world. See, in this century alone, Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill (Darkest Hour), Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking (The Theory of Everything), Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln (Lincoln), Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote (Capote), and Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles (Ray).

 This enthusiasm for biographical films has paid major dividends for members of BIO. And several  I know personally have been thrilled by the care with which the motion picture industry has transmitted their work to the screen. BIO stalwart Kai Bird is probably still basking in the glow of Oppenheimer, the 2023 Oscar winner based on his and Martin J. Sherwin’s deeply researched American Prometheus. Jack El-Hai was pleased with last year’s Nuremberg, which developed out of his gripping historical study, The Nazi and the Psychiatrist. When a BIO honoree, Candace Millard, published a 2011 historical work called Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, I  doubt she thought Hollywood would come calling. But someone at Netflix got involved, resulting in last year’s fascinating four-part miniseries, Death by Lightning, in which we follow the tragic trajectory of a nineteenth-century U.S. president, James A. Garfield, and his soon-to-be assassin, Charles J. Guiteau. This four-part series is too new to have come up for Emmy consideration, but many other awards-giving bodies have recognized the show’s excellence, with particular attention paid to lead actors Michael Shannon (as the appealingly idealistic Garfield) and Matthew Macfadyen (as the maddening and probably mad Guiteau).

 There is one honor that Death by Lightning has already won. Each spring, since 1988, the scholars behind the USC Scripter Awards have chosen the year’s best film adaptation of a work in print. Uniquely, at an awards ceremony held not long before Oscar night, both the screenwriter and the author of the original published work gain recognition  In 2016, USC added an award for episodic television series, and so Millard was in the winner’s circle when the TV Scripter went to her as well as to screenwriter Mike Makowsky. Bravo to them both.