Reports of movies based on current events are utterly unreliable – yet, there's something about the buried-hero scenario, writes DONALD CLARKE
IN THE summer of 1996, following Michelle Smith’s miraculous triumph at the Atlanta Olympics, an exciting story appeared in the newspapers. It seemed as if Hollywood was set to shoot a major biopic of the still-snow-white swimmer. It had, apparently, been suggested that Nicole Kidman (then still a movie star) would be playing the lead role in this exciting project.
Yeah, right. No media tale is less reliable than that announcing a movie based on a current event.
The Michelle Smith yarn had a particularly strong flavour of pub gossip about it. Who looks a bit like Smithy? Well that Kidman has similar hair. Yes, she’ll do.
With all this in mind, the sensible reader will stare sceptically at certain phrases in reports on the Chilean miners’ escape. It is said that the stricken workers have been offered media training. Several of them – deliberating from the depths – are supposedly in talks about book deals. Why, it won’t be long before some major actor will be identified as the lead in a movie.
Hang on. What’s this on a thousand news sites? “Javier Bardem is being lined up to star in a new movie about the trapped Chilean miners,” Sky News reports. “The Oscar-winning actor is favoured for a lead role in the film, which will tell the tale of the 33 men who have been trapped in a collapsed mine for the past two months.”
Once again, The Man in the Pub has spoken. The Bardem piece is an absolute classic of the genre. No sources. No studio is mentioned. A bloke at the saloon bar has simply plucked a name from the air. Almost any Spanish-speaking actor would have done. Gael García Bernal is, perhaps, a little too slight to play a miner. It’s either Benicio del Toro or Javier Bardem then. A coin is tossed and another pint ordered.
And yet. There is something undeniably saleable about the miners’ story.
Consider Billy Wilder's great film Ace in the Hole. Released in 1951, the picture stars Kirk Douglas as a cynical reporter who cunningly exploits a similar crisis for his own nefarious ends.
A man has become trapped in a grim cave while searching for ancient relics. Douglas pressurises the corrupt sheriff into slowing down the rescue efforts so that he can prolong the story’s occupation of the front pages. Carnival rides arrive at the rescue site. Something like a party atmosphere breaks out. The cynical anti-hero realises that stranded men in deep holes sell newspapers. Wilder knew that such tales make for good movies.
Forty years later, The Simpsonsparodied Ace in the Holein a classic episode entitled Radio Bart. The family's famously cheeky son tricks the residents of Springfield into thinking that a poor child named Timmy has become stranded at the bottom of a deep well. Before long, Sting has turned up to warble a charity record. Springfield begins chewing its finger nails, but loses interest when Bart actually falls in the well and, under pressure, reveals that the original crisis was an awful hoax.
Bart Simpson, Kent Brockman, Kirk Douglas and the Man in the Pub have all grasped beautiful truths about the buried-hero scenario. Unlike plane crashes, typhoons, collapsing bridges or mass shootings, such situations can take a long time to work themselves out. The initial catastrophe is followed by the seven stages of disaster-movie grief: mad shouting, blaming the fat guy, unveiling the coward, allowing the hero to emerge, the noble death of ethnic-minority man, the ignoble death of food hoarder, faint tapping that turns out to be another small avalanche, faint tapping that turns out to be bona fide rescuer. (If the disaster happens to take place in the Andes there may also be a sub-stage, during which rugby players consider eating the prop forward’s liver.)
The current disaster seems to have offered potential film-makers a whole swathe of delicious subplots. Character actors will be particularly interested in grabbing the role of Yonni Barrios. Nicknamed Dr House by his fellow miners, this brave fellow, following instructions via video-conference, managed to administer drugs, take blood samples and generally do the business of a less psychotic Hugh Laurie.
Where’s the conflict scriptwriters require? Well, while Yonni was playing the selfless hero, his wife and his lover, each previously unaware of the other, were engaged in a physical brawl at the rescue site’s canteen.
A dozen other stories are passably engaging. One fellow became engaged. Another chap learned about the birth of his first child. But Barrios’s adventures seem particularly suited to sentimentalised exploitation in a Hollywood movie.
Reports suggest that Philip Seymour Hoffman has been approached about the playing the part. No really. The Man in the Pub told me.