To rubber nose or not to rubber nose, that is the question.
Jack Nicholson as Jimmy Hoffa in "Hoffa": rubber nose.
Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf in "The Hours": rubber nose.
But Kevin Spacey as Bobby Darin in "Beyond the Sea": no rubber nose.
This is, of course, the eternal dilemma of that species of movie known as the biopic (headlinese, from the trade paper Variety, for "biographical picture"), in which the life of someone great or famous or at least noteworthy forms the dramatic arc of the film. It's a perdurable film category, primo catnip for Oscar and, with "Alexander," "Kinsey," "Ray," "The Aviator" and "Beyond the Sea" in the marketplace at the same time, suddenly hot again.
Why, it's just like the '30s, when the big prestige items were "The Story of Louis Pasteur," "The Life of Emile Zola" and "Juarez," all with Paul Muni. Then as now, the question for filmmakers is: Do we make our star look like our subject, or do we just let our star stay himself? Put another way: How much of the movie is about disguise and how much about performance? That's a far more penetrating question than: How much truth do we tell?
Muni had such a granite-hewn face, such a fierce dignity, such a presence, they pretty much left him alone. He made you believe, no matter what: Mexican, French guy No. 1, French guy No. 2. He was also the original Scarface and a fugitive from a chain gang, all equally brilliantly. So one answer to the question of how to capture the greatness of a historical figure is: Hire Paul Muni.
Alas, impossible today. So, historically the industry has opted for a middle ground, which might be called the "sort-of but not just-like" device, whereby the star suggests but does not duplicate the subject's face. Nobody really wanted to see George C. Scott made over as the far more mundane-looking Gen. George S. Patton (for "Patton," 1970), and in any event, what did it matter, as very few Americans actually knew what Patton looked like. But the actor couldn't look just like George C. Scott either. It appears that the actor's face was widened with some applications of putty, his hair was thinned (so that his squarer head looked like Patton's rounder head) and his teeth were muddied up. Thus you had a compromise that everybody could live with: one George becoming, but not yet become, the other. It won Scott an Oscar, which he famously turned down.
Nicholson tried the same thing in Danny DeVito's "Hoffa," but the results were much less satisfying. Nicholson doesn't look anything like the pugnacious late labor leader, whose tough little mug radiated aggression like steam heat. Such an icon was Hoffa that Nicholson couldn't play the role as Jack Nicholson, with those ironic bedroom eyes, those streamlined eyebrows. But to turn him into a complete Hoffa look-alike would require so much makeup, it would have immobilized the face. So the halfway decision was to glue a nose to his face that made him look not so much Hoffaesque as ugly-Jackesque. It was a calamitous move; you watched the movie but didn't notice it because you were wondering, "What's the deal with Jack's nose?"
But a nose worked for Kidman; it won her an Oscar. She went whole-hog, and I think one of the things that made the performance so splendid was her secret pleasure in being shed of her accursed beauty.
Her rubber schnoz didn't turn her into the spittin' image of the long- faced -- even dour -- Woolf by a long shot, but it had the effect of destroying Kidman's beauty, a transformation that Hollywood took for bravery. The ruined beauty at least made her less ridiculous as the manic-depressive novelist, who killed herself in 1941 by walking into a river with a pocketful of rocks. Who'd want to see a beautiful Kidman do that? Talk about bummers. But a gawky, freckly redhead with a nose like a boxer's? No problem. The evolution was subtle enough (it was a lot more than just a nose) that it freed you to concentrate on the character, not the face.
Charlize Theron, when she played the serial killer Aileen Wuornos in "Monster," went even wholer-hoggier. She didn't just disguise her beauty, she buried it under 40 pounds of new fat, as had, years earlier, Robert De Niro for his over-the-hill Jake La Motta in "Raging Bull," the originator of the "performance based on extra milkshakes" school of biopic.
But Theron didn't stop there. A plastic face application changed the subtle contours of her splendidly boned supermodel features, and finally a set of bad choppers was helmeted over her perfect Chiclets, and she didn't look anything like the Charlize that we have so adored, good movie or bad, for so long. Again, this was taken for bravery and, like Kidman, she was rewarded with an Oscar.
Another wrinkle, rarely attempted but present in the bijoux today, is to hire someone who looks like the actual person. That's one reason why Jamie Foxx is such a good Ray Charles in "Ray." It helps, of course, that he can do Ray to the tiniest detail, and it helps also that Ray had such a big stage presence that Foxx is able to capture his sense with a broad brush; that head-bobbing, infectious joy in the power of the music, the broadness of the smile, the sense of liberation that the music brought to this blind genius.
