Up this time, I’ve got five movies based on true stories (some more loosely than others).
Only the Brave is based on the life of wildfire firefighters, the Granite Mountain Hotshots, leading up to their ultimate death at the Yarnell Hill Fire. It features a strong cast of Josh Brolin, Miles Teller, and others. The movie seems very life-like and accurate, and is as real feeling as my other favorite firefighter movie, Backdraft. However, I was waiting for those moments of stirring emotion, and while the movie certainly tried to get me there, it never quite did. Whether that was the fault of the film or of my own, I don’t know, but it just didn’t do it for me. I did feel for the real-life heroes that gave their lives, and can appreciate the danger they put themselves in every year during the horrific wildfires we constantly see on the news, but this movie is just “eh.”
American Made is rather loose with the true details, but it is a fantastic, thrilling movie about the life of Barry Seal. Barry, played wonderfully by Tom Cruise, is an average joe pilot working for TWA when he is recruited by the CIA to capture photos flying over Central America during the Cold War. He is so successful that they ask him to start acting as a liaison between our government and General Noriega in Panama. During one such mission, he is recruited by Pablo Escobar and his cohorts to run cocaine for his cartel. Before long, the CIA also starts asking him to run guns to the contras in Nicaragua. Barry juggles all these balls for the rest of the film, bringing in cash faster than he can launder it, until it is piled head high in all his closets and buried around the yard all around the house. The movie is fun, thrilling, and Cruise has lost none of his charm and charisma. Even is the story isn’t entirely factual, I think the overall points are there, and as a movie, it is as exciting as they come.
Exciting for an entirely different reason, Marshall follows an important case early in the career of Thurgood Marshall, played by the always entertaining Chadwick Boseman, who is certainly making a name for himself in just the last couple years. Marshall is representing black people who are wrongly accused of crimes, with money being provided by the NAACP, who is finally using the law to gain rights for African Americans since the government has been slow in doing so. Marshall is brought in to defend Joe Spell, a black man accused of raping a white woman in Connecticut. The film is as electrifying as any action movie, with compelling twists and gripping, tense moments. I can’t recommend this one enough.
Battle of the Sexes is the lead up to and the match of tennis players Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King. In 1972, the women’s pro tournament is paying their winner’s one-eighth of what the men’s winners are taking in, and women’s biggest star, Billie Jean King, decides enough is enough. She gets a group of women to follow her to start their own league, getting corporate sponsorship to pay for it all. Meanwhile, retired pro Bobby Riggs, always a gambler and hustler, sees a way to promote a man vs woman match for a big paycheck for all involved. The movie is about gender equality for sure, something that obviously still resonates, but also shines a light on King’s sexual orientation, at a time when coming out would kill her career. The movie was ok, though I thought it a bit heavy handed in demanding to rouse our emotions. Emma Stone and Steve Carell were great as the leads. In a way, King did get what she sought, with the US Open giving equal prize money in 1973, though it would be another 34 years, in Venus and Serena Williams’ day, until Wimbledon finally did. Shamefully, to this day, tennis is the only major sport to offer equal pay for men’s and women’s players, showing that there is still a lot of work to be done.
The last biography is Goodbye Christopher Robin, based on the author and family of the creator of Winnie-the-Pooh, A.A. Milne. For a movie based on the background of a kid’s book, this isn’t the light-hearted tale you might expect. According to the film, the real life Christopher Robin Milne’s parents were fairly awful and self-centered people, putting their own interests first. Christopher, nicknamed Billy, uses his imagination to give life to his stuffed animals, since he has no other real friends to play with, and his dad uses that to write a book which obviously thrusts the family into the spotlight. They do not take the new fame well, with the Milne parents exploiting their son for continued exposure, and when confronted with their actions, they try to make Billy disappear by sending him to boarding school. I looked forward to this film because it is everything I generally like, being a biographical drama and about an author to boot, and the lead of Domhnall Gleeson (one of my favorites) is a bonus. Because it checks off so my items on my list, I enjoyed it very much, though others might think it a fairly average movie.
Jons Movie Takes 