The critically acclaimed Selma has taken some flak for reportedly (I haven’t seen it) showing President Johnson as trying to get King to postpone the Selma protest and generally not being a civil-rights supporter (LBJ was, in fact, a big supporter). Likewise The Imitation Game (again unseen) has been criticized for making stuff up (including that Turing was targeted by spies who tried blackmailing him over his homosexuality). The screenwriter of the latter, Graham Moore, argues that fact-checking biopics for accuracy is like fact-checking Monet’s water-lilly paintings for accuracy. Truthfulness is not the issue, drama is.
This is not totally unreasonable. Realism and accuracy aren’t the sole standard for judging a work of fiction; as I discuss here, errors don’t necessarily matter if they’re minor and the movie is otherwise excellent (however entertaining the endless print and online lists of factual errors may be).
However in the specific cases, it’s more than just whether the typefaces for the era were accurate. The idea homosexuals were uniquely vulnerable to blackmail from foreign spies was a rationale for barring them from government service (the book The Lavender Scare is very informative on this), even though there was no evidence they represented more of a security threat than adulterers or drug addicts, say. So if Imitation Game implies that they were indeed a security risk, that’s a rather big error, like showing international Jewish bankers involved in a secret conspiracy.
Plus, of course, I’ve yet to see a biopic that implied it wasn’t Based on a True Story. Nobody promotes a movie about a famous person by saying “A drama vaguely related to the life of Martin Luther King” or the like. The implication that we’re seeing reality is part of the hook: announcing it’s irrelevant is little different from adapting a book, promoting the connection (You loved the book! Now see the film!) and then when fans object the book has been mangled, proclaiming “Well, I think it should be judged in its own right.” Nobody ever says that before people plunk down ticket money.
I can’t evaluate the errors in either film or whether the good outweighs the bad, as I haven’t seen them. But there are definitely times it’s reasonable to criticize a film for inaccuracy. I enjoyed A Beautiful Mind, for example, but the film-makers’ version of Nash’s delusions is made up out of whole cloth, and it’s a big part of the movie (it didn’t help that in interviews they admitted they just used Nash as a convenient real person to fit a pre-existing story of theirs on). And the structure conforms too much to Hollywood cliches about the struggling genius and his torments to get away with any talk about art.
On the other hand, I have absolutely no problems with the fact Jupiter’s Darling, starring Howard Keel as Hannibal and Esther Williams as the Roman woman he falls for (“I take this woman—or I take Rome!”) is not even remotely tied to the real history of the Punic Wars (all rights to image with current holder). There’s no hard or fast rule… but insisting it’s not an issue at all (particularly when you’re under fire for errors) ain’t gonna cut it.
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