{"id":145296,"date":"2025-09-15T09:22:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-15T09:22:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/145296\/"},"modified":"2025-09-15T09:22:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-15T09:22:11","slug":"madonnas-film-could-kill-the-celebrity-biopic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/145296\/","title":{"rendered":"Madonna\u2019s film could kill the celebrity biopic"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n Getty Images \/ Handout<\/p>\n

Madonna is finally getting a biopic. It is going to be a disaster of epic proportions. Madonna will write and direct; Julia Garner will star. It\u2019s been going on for four years, and according to its lead it is still a \u201cwork in progress.\u201d There have already been alternate scripts and shelvings and a \u201cMadonna bootcamp,\u201d with multiple young actresses undergoing days of dance and vocal training. \u201cI cannot make this in the normal way,\u201d the singer warned over Instagram last year in a bout of frustration.<\/p>\n

The most dedicated Madonna-watchers might not see any need for it. She\u2019s been in film for about as long as she has been a pop star; this means there have already been around 20 Madonna biopics, all starring Madonna and carefully engineered to push the Madonna mythology as far back as it has been able to go. Few would call the pop star\u2019s film career a success. Her acting record is marred by misfires: she holds the all-time record of five Golden Raspberry awards for Worst Actress, and once got the nomination after appearing as herself.<\/p>\n

It is actually not unreasonable to say she appears as herself in every film. While still living in poverty and obscurity and sharpening her steely ambitions in 1970s New York, she played a dominatrix also doing all of those things in the very low budget rape-and-revenge film A Certain Sacrifice. She was legendarily the only member of cast or crew who received any pay at all. In Desperately Seeking Susan, perhaps the only universally well-received Madonna film, she wears her own clothes, uses her own mannerisms, plays her own song, and appears too sparingly to need to set up any narrative other than her own.<\/p>\n

For her True Blue album, which samples a 1930s gangster film, there was Shanghai Surprise, a comedy pastiche of a 1930s gangster film; to rub the salt in the wound she did post-Katharine Hepburn faux-screwball movie Who\u2019s That Girl?. For racy, controversial Erotica she sang about S&M and dressed as Marlene Dietrich on press junkets; a year later she used the rough sex defence in erotic courtroom drama Body of Evidence.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Erotica was a disaster for her public image. To rehabilitate it, she operated just like a Hollywood executive. Strange Swede Greta Garbo rose in public esteem after playing her lonely compatriot Queen Christina; Bette Davis solidified her screen personality as Elizabeth I. Madonna would become the First Lady of Argentina. \u201cThis is the role I was born to play,\u201d she argued in a four-page letter to Evita\u2019s producer, Alan Parker.<\/p>\n

The final product is the aptest possible hagiography of Madonna. Eva Per\u00f3n\u2019s organic-ish rise from obscurity is Madonna\u2019s; her negative press coverage and 85 costume changes are also Madonna\u2019s. When she reprises Don\u2019t Cry For Me Argentina on her deathbed it feels like a rehash of several earlier singles, not least Live To Tell.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Then there was the strange case of romantic-comedy-courtroom-drama The Next Best Thing. Real-Madonna loved her gay fanbase, so screen-Madonna got drunk and accidentally slept with her gay best friend. After spiritual tour de force Ray of Light, real-Madonna was deep into her Ashtanga phase, so screen-Madonna became a yoga teacher; real-Madonna had begun to sometimes affect an Estuary accent, so screen-Madonna had to be from somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Real-Madonna requested a directorial turn from 1960s cult sensation John Schlesinger. It became his worst film, and also his last.<\/p>\n

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Possibly seeking absolution, she married shoot-em-up director Guy Ritchie \u2013 ten years her junior \u2013 and moved to an estate in Wiltshire. She talked enthusiastically about the pub and was shot for Tim Walker for Vogue, wearing tweed and cradling a lamb. Ritchie cast her as the lead in a bewildering remake of Lina Wertmuller\u2019s 1970s arthouse film Swept Away, the story of a rich woman\u2019s tumultuous relationship with a younger shiphand. Ritchie and Madonna argued on the New York Times record about whose idea this was. They would both have been wiser to drop the subject.<\/p>\n

Then it was time for Madonna to direct. She\u2019d been foreshadowing the move for years; an inspection of old press junkets will reveal a taste in cinema so high-minded as to put an arthouse programmer to shame. In 1999 she chided an interviewer who hadn\u2019t seen Liliana Cavani\u2019s The Night Porter. In her behind-the-scenes diary from the shooting of Evita, published as the cover story in a 1996 issue of Vanity Fair, she reeled off a list of filmmakers she has discussed with the director of the Argentinian National Library. \u201cRenoir, Godard, Bunuel, Pasolini, Cocteau, Rossellini, and Visconti,\u201d she said. \u201cWhew!\u201d<\/p>\n

2008\u2019s Filth and Wisdom, her very first directorial effort,was a comedy-drama set in a London flatshare. It boasted an ensemble cast; one character, a ballerina in poverty forced to strip, may have been a stand-in for a very young Madonna.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe has made a movie so incredibly bad,\u201d said Peter Bradshaw, \u201cthat Berlin festivalgoers were staggering around yesterday in a state of clinical shock, deathly pale and mewling like maltreated kittens.\u201d \u201cNot an outright embarrassment,\u201d said the Telegraph, more kindly.<\/p>\n

Another film was called for. 2011\u2019s W.E. is the story of a woman who is stuck in an abusive marriage and finds solace in the long-dead Wallis Simpson, who sometimes appears to her as a ghost. \u201cA film by Alain Resnais called Last Year at Marienbad really influenced me,\u201d Madonna told the audience at an early BFI screening. Marienbad is notoriously one of the most confusing films of the French New Wave; W.E. lives up to its promise. Madonna\u2019s screenplay sits somewhere between quippy 1930s comedy and hysterical telenovela. The shots are often sumptuous, but they also make little sense in three-dimensional space. The Guardian gave it a single star.\u00a0<\/p>\n

W.E. has no Madonna in it, but it is the ultimate Madonna biopic. She plays both the main character and the historical ghost. Wallis Simpson abdicated the throne and crossed the Atlantic for a man she was only lukewarm on, as did Madonna. The real-time character is in a tumultuous marriage, as Madonna was to Sean Penn.<\/p>\n

This postmodern semi-autobiographical mode works. A straight biopic will not. It is a tricky business to tell the story of someone who has spent her entire life mythologising herself; it is borderline irresponsible to delegate the deceptively simple task to the subject herself.<\/p>\n

We will keep running into this if pop stars try to meddle in their own films. Elton and Elvis and Freddie Mercury have all managed to pass onto the silver screen. But their lives are easily transmuted into straightforward, self-contained heroes\u2019 journeys. You can talk of Elvis\u2019s 1950s while actually staying inside the 1950s; you can take Mercury\u2019s life and treat it as a tragic microcosm of a larger historical pattern.<\/p>\n

But Madonna is the first pop star to moonlight as a historian. She has always used film as a way to bolster small parts of her narrative; their minutiae are subsumed into the whole. But this tendency has only made it impossible to subsume her life into film. It has been good for her longevity. It may be the last nail in the coffin for the pop biopic.<\/p>\n

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