The challenge for any biopic is to figure out how to tell its particular subject’s story in a way that fits them. How do you match cinematic form to that person’s eccentricities? It’s what makes a movie like Todd Haynes’ Bob Dylan biopic “I’m Not There” work so well – it’s a little strange, a little opaque, and zigs when you think it will zag. Much like Dylan himself.
“A Magnificent Life,” the new animated biographical film about the life of French playwright, novelist, and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol, gets about halfway to that ideal. Written and directed by Sylvain Chomet, the two-dimensional animation style is beautiful, with a type of texture and roughness that so rarely is captured in 3D animation, and the film evolves artistically at the same time as Pagnol, creating a nice symmetry between film and subject.
However, a lackluster dub and a poorly devised structure keep this biopic firmly in the realm of the typical, no matter how hard it tries not to be.
“A Magnificent Life” starts towards the end of Pagnol’s life, with those around him celebrating his storied career, such as his stage work and his famous trilogy of 1930s films known as the Marseille Trilogy. He’s writing a memoir, but struggling with the fact that as an artist, he’s become a little passé – “What’s the point of writing things that people no longer wish to read?” he laments. He’s a relic of history now, no longer an artist on the cutting edge.
So, he’s content to forget about his memoir, tinkering around in his workshop and steadily ignoring the publisher who has come to collect a manuscript. But someone is not so willing to let him give up. An apparition of a little boy suddenly appears in Marcel’s study. It’s his younger self, there to serve as inspiration and lead older Marcel on a journey through his life.
As we come to find out, this apparition has always been there, a sort of metaphysical representation of Marcel’s artistic passion. He was there when Marcel’s mother died, when he first moved from Marseille to Paris, through his formative successes and failures, through his numerous romantic relationships. But – as cute as the little ghost boy may be – this narrative device serves no interesting function. It seems to only exist to divert attention away from the fact that “A Magnificent Life” is a fairly standard biopic.
In the music biopic spoof “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,” the joke is that Dewey Cox has to think about his whole life before he goes onstage. This apparition is little more than a light update of that exact framing device, setting up an extended flashback that is the entirety of Marcel’s life (Someone might as well say, “Marcel has to think about his whole life before he writes a memoir.”) The pacing of that extended flashback runs into similar problems of other standard biopics, alternately rushing and dragging throughout – it feels a lot like reading a Wikipedia page.
Perhaps the most confusing choice in “A Magnificent Life” – at least, in the English-speaking market – was the decision to release a dubbed version of the film instead of the original French with subtitles. I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that the Marseille accent plays such a huge role in the film – when Pagnol is asked to write about Marseille, he is initially hesitant because of the necessity in getting the very particular Marseille accent just right. It’s possible that some distributor thought that English-speaking audiences wouldn’t pick up on the differences between Parisian French and French in Marseille, but that still seems a poor excuse to offer up a dub with mostly British voices that simply feel wrong in the world of the film.
The best thing to write home about in “A Magnificent Life” is the animation itself, which has so much depth and texture, and often feels like it’s really on film – at one point, Marcel’s Parisian apartment looks like it was designed to emulate a slight fisheye lens. The animation adapts throughout the film to match where Marcel is in his life. When he moves to Paris, we’re met with old-timey Parisian posters, and his transition from the stage to cinema is marked by a section of the film that plays like an old silent movie. As filmmaking becomes his main artistic medium, the world of the film opens up – because movies in general have more leeway, now “A Magnificent Life” is similarly no longer limited by the dimensions of space.
The decision to match different stretches of Marcel’s life with different stylistic flairs is the type of ingenuity that takes a regular biopic to new heights. Unfortunately, the story itself can’t match that innovation, the filmmakers not taking the medium far enough for someone as influential as Marcel Pagnol.