Bio-hazard

WITH A DEAFENING box office silence and a bouquet of critical pans, ''Beyond the Sea,'' Kevin Spacey's life of Bobby Darin, brings the Christmas bumper crop of biopics to a fitting anticlimax. The late-2004 Oscar race saw Hollywood transformed into a biography mill, with ''Ray,'' ''Alexander,'' ''The Motorcycle Diaries,'' ''Kinsey,'' ''Finding Neverland,'' ''The Aviator,'' ''The Sea Inside,'' and other pictures telling the life stories of assorted notables.

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Audiences routinely shun biopics, and critics give them short shrift. David Edelstein, movie critic for Slate, recently denounced the biopic as ''the least-satisfying of film genres,'' in which ''form and content are rival blood types, fatally incompatible.'' This set off a flood of reader mail, including some rich citations of awesomely bad biopic dialogue -- the most memorable bit from Franklin Schaffner's ''Nicholas and Alexandra'' (1971): ''Nice work on the manifesto, Trotsky!''

Only in the corridors of industry self-congratulation does the biopic get respect. A survey of recent Oscar winners turns up an alarming number of statuettes awarded to portrayers of ''real'' people: Charlize Theron (for ''Monster''), Nicole Kidman (or her prosthetic nose, in ''The Hours''), Julia Roberts (''Erin Brockovich''), Hilary Swank (''Boys Don't Cry''), Adrien Brody (''The Pianist''), and so on. And at tonight's Golden Globes, biopics are up for three of the five Best Drama awards and all five Best Actor awards.

Theoretically, the lives of great or grotesque luminaries should be interesting. The question, then, isn't whether the biopic is a jinxed genre, but why.

One theory was advanced a few years ago by the moralizing critic Michael Medved, who excoriated Hollywood for focusing on ''traitors, terrorists [and] self-destructive losers'' rather than celebrating great achievements. This is precisely wrong. Among recent biopics, the worst (''De-Lovely,'' anyone?) have concentrated on high achievers, while some of the best (''Ed Wood,'' ''I Shot Andy Warhol,'' ''The People Vs. Larry Flynt'') have sung the marginal or the monstrous.

If anything, biopics feature too many noble figures. At least 10 different actors have played Ernest Hemingway on film (James Gandolfini and Nick Nolte will portray him in upcoming movies). Though he ended up an alcoholic suicide, Hemingway is remembered as a Nobel Prize winner, literary lion, and inspiration to generations of tough-guy writers. How much more material would there be in the life of Ezra Pound, the insufferable, fascist-worshipping genius/madman who was locked up in a cage at the end of World War II?

Another dead end is the argument that biopics go wrong by drawing parochial lessons for our own time from historical figures. But revisionist biography remains a fruitful field -- the more insane the revisionism, the more interesting it can be. Psychiatric pioneer Havelock Ellis and family planning doyenne Margaret Sanger had an alleged kinky romance that admirers of both try to downplay; why not put this story front and center, in a ''Henry and June''-style piece of cinematic transgression starring Gabriel Byrne and Cate Blanchett? Why hasn't Gary Oldman -- a stalwart with several biopics to his name, most notably his ur-punk performance ''Sid and Nancy'' -- portrayed Oliver Cromwell, Britain's original punker?

The best explanation of bad bio-rhythms may be that the humble biopic is expected to employ a time frame and dramatic arc that would be out of place in any other genre. Nobody watching ''Shrek,'' or even ''Shrek 2,'' is expecting to get the full warp and woof of Shrek's life, from birth to death. Why should Frida Kahlo be forced to carry that dramatic load?

Nobody pays much heed to the Aristotelian unities these days, but the full story of a human life, or even a years-long portion of it, still makes unwieldy dramatic material. Rather than passing along bulky tales like the TV movie ''John and Yoko: A Love Story,'' a skillful filmmaker would recount the story of the famous 1969 ''bed-in for peace,'' culminating with Lennon and Ono's legendary run-in with Al Capp (in which the pugnacious cartoonist surprisingly got the best of the otherworldly couple in an argument over the Vietnam War).

If some enterprising biopic-maker is looking for material, I suggest the tragicomic romance of Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner (recently played by the pretty but un-Gardneresque Kate Beckinsale in ''The Aviator''), the only episode in history where anybody was able to make a monkey out of the Chairman of the Board.

In her great biography ''His Way,'' Kitty Kelley details the depths of public self-abasement Sinatra endured after the breakup, encapsulated in the story of a poker game at his apartment, as told by then-roommate Jule Styne. The poker buddies discover a boozed-up Sinatra, in a den that he has converted into a Gardner shrine, saluting a photograph of Ava. A few hours later, Styne hears crashing sounds coming from the den, and finds the enraged Sinatra ripping the same photo to bits. A while after that, another friend comes in to find Sinatra, now penitent, down on his hands and knees, frantically searching under tables and chairs for the ripped-up pieces of the photo.

Who wouldn't want to see that on the big screen? I'd pay good money just to see a movie about the poker game.

Tim Cavanaugh is the editor of Reason Online (www.reason.com). He lives in San Francisco.