And we can be heroes, just for one film

Heroes: the great men and women who have come mostly before our time, have long been known to us in story and books, and in this day and age we often see them portrayed on the Big Screen.
The latest addition to this gallery of actors playing heroes is Academy Award winning actor Forrest Whitacker, who has been signed on to play the widely regarded jazz musician Louis Armstrong in ‘It’s a Wonderful World.’ This is not the first time Forrest has played a well-known real life figure, having tackled the part of General Idi Amin in the 2006 film ‘The Last King of Scotland,’ for which he won an Academy Award.

There is a danger however in actors playing these larger than life characters on the big screen. To each of us a hero has been embodied in a reverent veneer of their own in our imaginations. In seeing an actor play our idols on the big screen we can be amazed, lucky to be granted an opportunity to see our heroes reincarnated in flesh in blood for a small while- or it could be a travesty, an insult to the memories of a great person.

Luckily Hollywood has a propensity to produce biographical films chronicling accurately (more or less depending on the film) the lives and events that past figures have been involved in and filling them with talented actors who can recreate the pull these figures exerted in their own lives.

Some diamonds of the biopic genre include Walk the Line starring Joaquin Phoenix, as a deeply-troubled Johnny Cash and Reese Witherspoon as his long suffering companion June Carter ( for which the 2005 Oscar for Best Supporting Actress). Phoenix’s role was widely and rightly lauded as “transcendent” and his was an acting tour de force. Even the soundtrack on which Witherspoon and Phoenix perform could very easily pass as genuine Cash. A fitting tribute to a “commanding figure in music history”

While I may not have watched as many biopics in my life as I would like to ( I still have yet to see A Mighty Heart, the biopic of the search for kidnapped and ultimately murdered Daniel Pearl), the ones I have had the pleasure of seeing have left me genuinely impressed.

Having recently watched the 1996 movie Michael Collins, I saw not Liam Neeson (as the eponymous character) in yet another film role but a man fighting in threat of his life for a cause he believed in and with true conviction. Even in watching Alan Rickman’s portrayal of Eamon De Valera I did not for a moment see Severus Snape shooting down our titular character in meetings, but an intelligent leader too full of confidence in his own ideas and plans to countenance that he could be wrong and that he would have to settle for less (even the revelation of an Englishman playing this huge figure of Irish independence did not spark in me nationalistic derisions of an English actor playing this pivotal Irishman).

While it would be easy to accuse Hollywood of plundering history and legacies for their next summer theatre filler, it is to their boon that they often produce distinguished and eminent accounts of the lives we so idolize throughout our own.