The genre of the movie biography is often marked (or marred) by hero worship, historical inaccuracy, and more clichés than one can tolerate. Usually, a director has a specific reason for selecting a project about a particular person. Biopics are usually about heroes, or at least about misunderstood good people. When such a picture is attempted about a villain or ne'er-do-well, a very fine tightrope must be walked between whitewashing and playing it safe with a politically correct hatchet job.
With THE PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT, director Milos Forman treads that tightrope with confidence. His protagonist is a man whom millions have condemned as a vile pornographer and character assassin. Telling any kind of story from the perspective of Larry Flynt or anyone like him is dangerous. But Forman is careful to be thoroughly analytical in his examination of Flynt's life. He does not try to lick the publisher's boots, but simply presents him as he was (albeit in a heightened fashion). Forman's Flynt is a man whose ambition, bad temper, and appetite for anarchy get him into a lot of trouble; at the same time, he is not devoid of relatable human feeling.
Almost as if to parody Abraham Lincoln's beginnings, Forman first shows Flynt as a Kentucky youth living in a log cabin. Eager to get ahead in life, he haphazardly concocts his own moonshine and peddles it to local drunks. A few decades later, his fortunes have improved somewhat: he now operates a low-rent, semi-successful burlesque house in downtown Cincinnati. But far from being content with making enough money to live comfortably, Flynt is on the cusp of unleashing on the world his own redneck manifesto. Condemning Playboy as an elitist publication, he vows to create a men's magazine that values the beer-drinker over the martini-drinker. The result is Hustler - which, far from being just another girlie magazine, vents Flynt's class anger by lashing out in vicious mockery of a world that he and his clients never made.
As his recreational tastes begin to run to the abstract, Flynt becomes increasingly outspoken about his supposed relevance as a spokesman for First Amendment rights. When his magazine is banned in some cities, this confirmed hedonist transforms into something of a pagan pulpit-pounder. His barnstorming eventually brings him into contact with a more traditional kind of pulpit-pounder: Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell. Under pretense of jesting, Flynt low-blows Reverend Falwell with an obscene and slanderous ad parody. The stage is now set for a somewhat farcical battle of wills that manages to mount high enough to reach the Supreme Court.
Whether you admire Flynt or not, it is easy to take away from Forman's movie the basic message that his rights as a publisher were just as precious as anyone else's. Problem is, Larry seeks not just vindication but domination: he is hell-bent on testing the very limits of constitutional license and public tolerance, repeatedly daring an uptight world to silence him. His megalomania causes him to be far more concerned about all the free publicity his magazine receives from the controversy than with anything as elevated as constitutional freedoms. Woody Harrelson must be commended for capturing with aplomb the audacity of a man whose circus-like antics masked a ruthless determination to hype and exploit himself no less sordidly than any of the naked women in his magazine. That this man has become an icon for the rights of American democracy and capitalism is a bitter irony for many to stomach, but it is no less true because of that.
The real-life figures portrayed in this movie are rendered without compromise and with an eye toward objectivity; Forman resists the urge to place anyone on a pedestal or drag anyone through the mud. Harrelson convincingly brings to life a colorful and imaginative man who gradually becomes emboldened, then intoxicated, and finally consumed by his petty sense of self-importance. And Jerry Falwell, far from being demonized, is portrayed with great tact and understanding; that he sometimes comes across as a glad-hander may not always be bearable, but it is believable.
THE PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT reminds me of why I so enjoy modern Hollywood biographical films. They are always about figures who live their lives to the fullest, often with complete disregard for the consequences. Larry Flynt inhabits a world that is totally his own, and he will not rest until every inch of that internal experience has been projected onto the outside world in all its tawdry glory. "I turned the whole world into a tabloid!" he exults at one point. Watching it all on a screen, safely quarantined by the passage of time and by ironic distance, it is hard not to share in that exhilaration.
With THE PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT, director Milos Forman treads that tightrope with confidence. His protagonist is a man whom millions have condemned as a vile pornographer and character assassin. Telling any kind of story from the perspective of Larry Flynt or anyone like him is dangerous. But Forman is careful to be thoroughly analytical in his examination of Flynt's life. He does not try to lick the publisher's boots, but simply presents him as he was (albeit in a heightened fashion). Forman's Flynt is a man whose ambition, bad temper, and appetite for anarchy get him into a lot of trouble; at the same time, he is not devoid of relatable human feeling.
Almost as if to parody Abraham Lincoln's beginnings, Forman first shows Flynt as a Kentucky youth living in a log cabin. Eager to get ahead in life, he haphazardly concocts his own moonshine and peddles it to local drunks. A few decades later, his fortunes have improved somewhat: he now operates a low-rent, semi-successful burlesque house in downtown Cincinnati. But far from being content with making enough money to live comfortably, Flynt is on the cusp of unleashing on the world his own redneck manifesto. Condemning Playboy as an elitist publication, he vows to create a men's magazine that values the beer-drinker over the martini-drinker. The result is Hustler - which, far from being just another girlie magazine, vents Flynt's class anger by lashing out in vicious mockery of a world that he and his clients never made.
As his recreational tastes begin to run to the abstract, Flynt becomes increasingly outspoken about his supposed relevance as a spokesman for First Amendment rights. When his magazine is banned in some cities, this confirmed hedonist transforms into something of a pagan pulpit-pounder. His barnstorming eventually brings him into contact with a more traditional kind of pulpit-pounder: Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell. Under pretense of jesting, Flynt low-blows Reverend Falwell with an obscene and slanderous ad parody. The stage is now set for a somewhat farcical battle of wills that manages to mount high enough to reach the Supreme Court.
Whether you admire Flynt or not, it is easy to take away from Forman's movie the basic message that his rights as a publisher were just as precious as anyone else's. Problem is, Larry seeks not just vindication but domination: he is hell-bent on testing the very limits of constitutional license and public tolerance, repeatedly daring an uptight world to silence him. His megalomania causes him to be far more concerned about all the free publicity his magazine receives from the controversy than with anything as elevated as constitutional freedoms. Woody Harrelson must be commended for capturing with aplomb the audacity of a man whose circus-like antics masked a ruthless determination to hype and exploit himself no less sordidly than any of the naked women in his magazine. That this man has become an icon for the rights of American democracy and capitalism is a bitter irony for many to stomach, but it is no less true because of that.
The real-life figures portrayed in this movie are rendered without compromise and with an eye toward objectivity; Forman resists the urge to place anyone on a pedestal or drag anyone through the mud. Harrelson convincingly brings to life a colorful and imaginative man who gradually becomes emboldened, then intoxicated, and finally consumed by his petty sense of self-importance. And Jerry Falwell, far from being demonized, is portrayed with great tact and understanding; that he sometimes comes across as a glad-hander may not always be bearable, but it is believable.
THE PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT reminds me of why I so enjoy modern Hollywood biographical films. They are always about figures who live their lives to the fullest, often with complete disregard for the consequences. Larry Flynt inhabits a world that is totally his own, and he will not rest until every inch of that internal experience has been projected onto the outside world in all its tawdry glory. "I turned the whole world into a tabloid!" he exults at one point. Watching it all on a screen, safely quarantined by the passage of time and by ironic distance, it is hard not to share in that exhilaration.