THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 51 NOVEMBER 13, 2019
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TTYIMAGES.Wounded Shepherd, “Notwithstanding
the scheming of Benedict’s courtiers, the
266th successor of Saint Peter enjoys a
close relationship with the 265th, one that
long predates Francis’ election.”
Elton John biopic Rocketman shuffles
the facts of its hero’s life and takes some
license (he didn’t adopt John Lennon’s
name and didn’t marry Renate Blauel until
years later) but otherwise sticks to the
truth, at least as John sees them. “Having
an unreliable narrator was important,”
acknowledges director Dexter Fletcher.
Fletcher’s touchstone was “emotional
truth” — “the emotional memory departs
from the facts and the memory becomes
the story,” he admits — but he did change
one script element to make it more factu-
ally accurate. In real life, Elton discovered
Elvis when his mother gave him an album;
Fletcher initially showed him seeing Elvis
on TV. “That was the only thing Elton was
adamant about,” he says.
The central conceit of Martin
Scorsese’s The Irishman, that gangster
Frank Sheeran murdered Teamsters
leader Jimmy Hoffa, also has come
under attack.
“Frank Sheeran said he killed JimmyO
n March 17, 2002, John Nash, the
Nobel laureate whose story was told
in A Beautiful Mind, made an extraor-
dinary appearance on 60 Minutes. In
the interview, he spoke about math-
ematics, schizophrenia and a whisper
campaign that he was anti-Semitic,
which had started to spread as his movie
was gaining awards traction and which
he denied.
Nash’s interview was Universal’s
last-ditch attempt to save what had
been the clear frontrunner until rivals
floated rumors deemed so damaging
that many assumed the film was doomed.
In the end, it won four Oscars including
best picture.
Now, once again, questions of fact ver-
sus fiction are rearing their heads in a year
stacked with reality-based movies, rang-
ing from tales that deliberately toy with
the truth (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,
Jojo Rabbit) to biopics (Harriet, Judy)
to docudramas (Bombshell, Just Mercy)
to the partly real but fictionalized (The
Irishman, The Two Popes). With “fake
news” dominating the media, how much
fakery will Oscar voters accept?
“Film is not a mirror,” says Charles
Randolph, writer of Bombshell, about
Fox News chief Roger Ailes’ alleged
harassment of his female colleagues. “It’s
a canvas.”
His movie’s veracity is questioned by
Ailes’ lawyer, Susan Estrich, who calls it
“very entertaining fiction,” without giving
specifics. While Randolph says he spoke
to 20 Ailes associates (he won’t say if they
include anchors Gretchen Carlson and
Megyn Kelly), he acknowledges that one
of his leads (played by Margot Robbie) is
a composite “based on the narrative of
three different women that I had either
direct or secondhand information about.”
Still, he argues, a movie is not reportage
and “film has to be in dialogue with other
cultural forms.”
More controversial is The Two Popes,
Fernando Meirelles’ account of meet-
ings between Pope Benedict XVI and his
successor, Pope Francis. Three Vatican
experts contacted by THR are skeptical
about the movie’s rose-hued depiction of
the pontiffs’ relationship.
“They had nothing remotely resembling
the relationship suggested by the film,”
says George Weigel, author of Witness to
Hope, a biography of Pope John Paul II. As
to the movie’s suggestion that Benedict
told Bergoglio he planned to retire and
wanted him as his successor, it’s “abso-
lutely inconceivable and totally false.” By
contrast, the leading authority on Francis,
Austen Ivereigh, argues in his new book,Oscar Contenders Reckon
With Fact Versus Fiction
Some stick to the truth, others take liberties, and then there are those
that spin an entirely new, history-altering narrative. A year after Green Book
survived attacks, how much fakery will voters accept this season?Hoffa. He said he killed Joey Gallo, too.
And he said he did some other really bad
things nearly as incredible,” writes Bill
To n e l l i i n Slate. “Most amazingly, Sheeran
did all that without ever being arrested,
charged or even suspected of those
crimes by any law enforcement agency.”
Adds Harvard Law School professor
Jack Goldsmith in The New York Review
of Books: “ ‘True crime’ films often take
license with factual details. But The
Irishman goes well beyond these conven-
tions, since the entire story is premised on
a confession that is not credible.”
How greatly such accusations damage
the movies may depend on two factors:
first, whether facts matter to Academy
members more today than a year ago,
when questions about Green Book’s
accuracy failed to derail its Oscar win;
and second, how seriously the facts are
altered. So far, no contender seems so
egregious as to create a firestorm.
But, says John Cornwell, author of the
Vatican exposé A Thief in the Night, any
alteration of the truth may ultimately hurt
audiences more than the movies’ awards
hopes: “When distortion happens, it’s
very unfortunate.”THE RACE | STEPHEN GALLOWAY
1 A detailed
model of Goose
the cat is made,
with pins
marking whisker
placement.
2 Samuel L.
Jackson’s Nick
Fury forms
a close bond
with Goose.
3 Brie Larson’s
cat allergy led
to the VFX
team creating
an animated
cat that moved
and jumped like
a real cat.
4 Once the
animated cat was
crafted into the
scene, the VFX
team went to
work on layering
muscle and fur
to make Goose
come alive.
5 The cat is
fleshed out
with details,
modeling Goose’s
features on
Reggie, the real-
life tabby that
the VFX team
used for the alien
feline creature.
Top (from left): Pope Francis and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in 2017; Anthony Hopkins and
Jonathan Pryce in The Two Popes. Bottom: Elton John (left) in 1980; Taron Egerton in Rocketman.