Movies about Writers—For the Oscars

On first thought it seems that movies about writers are a contradiction in terms. Writing is an introspective art that relies on intangible thoughts and feelings. The process of writing mainly involves sitting still for long periods of time. Movies, on the other hand, are all about action and motion. Films look at human behavior entirely from the outside, with the exception of a voiceover narration.

Jessica Brown Findlay in This Beautiful Fantastic

But in fact there have been quite a number of terrific films where the character of a writer plays an important part. I asked friends on Facebook to nominate movies they like about writers, and to my shock, twenty titles appeared within a day, an incredible variety from film noir to fantasy to contemporary realism. Thank you so much to for all the suggestions—I’m sorry I couldn’t include all of them in this blog. Here are the nominees for best films about writers:

The accomplished translator of Persian literature and opera libretto author Niloufar Talebi suggested a movie I’d never heard of, much less seen, This Beautiful Fantastic. When I watched it, I was entranced by the excellent performances of Jessica Brown Findlay, Tom Wilkinson, Andrew Scott, and Jeremy Irvine. It’s a fairy tale about a very OCD writer in the U.K. who is forced out of her interior world into a reality that can be harsh but is ultimately blessed. Niloufar also picked The Lives of Others, about writers in East Germany during the Cold War era, a deeply felt and brilliant movie.

Russian translator and publisher Jim Kates nominated Julia, which must be Jane Fonda’s best movie, and maybe Vanessa Redgrave’s as well. A story of Lillian Hellman’s childhood friend who ends up in the resistance against fascism right before World War II, Julia is taken from Hellman’s own writing in her wonderful memoir, Pentimento.

Jane Fonda as Lillian Hellman in Julia

Documentary filmmaker Andrea Simon, the painter Jessica Dunne, and poet George Higgins all picked a movie I greatly admire, Bright Star, about the romance of poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne, an elegant and intelligent period flick.

The writers Ernestine Hayes and Lisa Stice both selected Stranger Than Fiction, a moving comedy where Emma Thompson plays a frazzled novelist who begins to tamper with reality when she steps into her own literary world. Great cast, fun plot!

Poet and naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield nominated I Am Not Your Negro, a fascinating documentary that matches images to James Baldwin’s final, unpublished manuscript, a provocative mediation on race, the U.S.A., and the soul of a country.

Poet Vivian Faith Prescott picked The Business of Fancydancing, Sherman Alexie’s powerful film about identity, love, and the literary profession.

Historian Miranda Sachs voted for Shakespeare in Love, a captivating story based on the bard’s writing and bits of fact that the screenwriter extrapolated to create a fine plot with wonderful acting.

Creative nonfiction writer David Stevenson told me about Genius, a strong film on the unlikely subject of a literary editor, Maxwell Perkins. The movie depicts the relationship between Perkins, who edited such authors as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway at Scribner’s, and the novelist Thomas Wolfe. Excellent performances by Colin Firth, Jude Law, and Nicole Kidman.

I have a weakness for film noir, so I have to mention In A Lonely Place, a Nicholas Ray flick starring Humphrey Bogart as a Hollywood writer who has 24 hours to solve a murder and exonerate himself.

Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place

I also love Judy Davis’s intelligent and emotional portrayal of George Sand in Impromptu and her performance in My Brilliant Career, based on the novel by the Australian writer Miles Franklin.

And a recent addition: Their Finest, a 2016 sleeper about screenwriters working on propaganda films in the UK during World War II.  Bill Nighy has a wonderful supporting role as a washed-up actor recruited for a hokey picture, and Helen McCrory is marvelous as his Polish agent. Stay with this movie—it starts out corny but that’s just the set-up for a strong ending.

Speaking of Helen McCrory, she has a great cameo as the novelist Ann Radcliffe in Becoming Jane, a film about Jane Austen's early years. As overloaded as I feel by the Jane Austen craze, this film is a delight to watch, with a wonderful cast of Anne Hathaway, Maggie Smith, Ian Richardson, and Julie Walters.

Here’s another: Mistress America, starring the multitalented Greta Gerwig, who collaborated on the screenplay with director Noah Baumbach. The film follows an awkward and lovable college student trying to gain acceptance as a fledgling writer at Barnard College. The stepsister-to-be of the young writer, Gerwig plays a goofy and hilarious character who isn’t much good at anything but is all the more charismatic because of that.

More still: in 2018, the movie Mary Shelley took the life of the author of Frankenstein and turned it into a compelling story of a brilliant young woman succeeding in the man’s world of the English romantic writers. Terrific cast, excellent screenplay, fine direction by Saudi Arabia’s first woman filmmaker, Haifaa Al-Mansour.

The 2019 film Little Women, written and directed by Greta Gerwig, is also a terrific story about a struggling young woman writer, based on the book by Louisa May Alcott.

My Dog Stupid (Mon Chien Stupide) is a recent French movie based on a short story by U.S. author John Fante. Great performances by screenplay writer Yvan Attal and Charlotte Gainsbourg, who are also a couple in real life. 

Mothering Sunday is an unlikely title for a movie about an orphaned young maid whose path leads her to become a writer. It’s a worthwhile film, with a great supporting performance by Colin Firth as a man too preoccupied with his own family’s troubles to notice much else, but with good instincts. 

The list goes on!

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Using Poetic Forms, Part 2: The Sonnet

Probably the most popular poetic form in English is the sonnet. It’s a form that goes back many centuries. Invented in Sicily in the 13^th century by Giacomo da Lentini, the sonnet caught fire and became enormously popular in Italy and then throughout Western Europe in the subsequent centuries. In most European languages, the sonnet has fourteen lines of twelve syllables each. Only in English does it have ten syllables in iambic pentameter. In English the most famous sonneteer is, of course, Shakespeare, but he was far from the first or the last to popularize the form in that language.

When to use the sonnet form

A sonnet usually has a volta (from the Italian word for “turn”), traditionally after the eighth line. This indicates a switch from what is laid out in the first eight lines, to a different mode or state of mind. So the sonnet is like an argument that has a decisive shift two-thirds of the way through.

A sonnet begins with exposition, and then reaches a conclusion. Or a sonnet starts with a problem, and works toward resolution. It has to be a situation that can be spelled out and resolved in 120 syllables, which isn’t a lot of verbiage, so an extremely complicated premise isn’t going to work. The topic of a sonnet also has to lend itself to the argument, counter-argument format, though that is less important in more recent sonnets, such as the poems of Marilyn Hacker, which tend to be more narrative.

Here’s a sonnet that seems to me almost a perfect embodiment of the form, John Keats’s great poem, “Bright Star”:

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors —
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft swell and fall,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

The first eight lines, called the octave, present a model of constancy, using diction that is full of distance, coolness, and religiosity: “lone,” “aloft,” “watching,” “Eremite (hermit),” “priestlike,” “pure,” “ablution,” “mask,” “snow,” “mountains,” “moors.” Everything suggests the opposite of heat or passion. The rhymes are tight and unwavering: art-apart, night-Eremite, task-mask. At least until the last word of the octave, or first eight lines. These first eight lines spell out the argument or the problem—the speaker yearns for the fidelity of the star. The star is a perfect image of loyalty, particularly the pole star or North Star that stays in one place in the sky, but it’s also remote and untouched, which makes it an incomplete role model for lovers.

In the sestet, the last six lines, Keats gives us the counter-argument, making it clear from the first word—“No”—that he’s going to show us the exact opposite of that cold version of constancy. The contrary is the extremely close, warm, and intimate image of the speaker lying with his head on his lover’s chest. He feels the motion of her breath as her chest rises and falls. This is as far as you can get from the distant, cold-hearted star. And yet the speaker hopes to combine this time-bound passion with the constancy of the star: “yet still stedfast.”  Interestingly, this bodily version of love could lead to something even more immortal than the star: “And so live ever,” but it can also lead to mortality: “or else swoon to death.”

One thing Keats shows us in “Bright Star” is that the sonnet can take in everything from passion to metaphysics in just fourteen lines. It's a great form to play out an argument you're having with yourself or another person, but not a violent argument, more like differing viewpoints. The form can also portray a moment of intense closeness. Oddly, Keats addresses the poem to the star, using the intimate “thou” form. The poet speaks of his beloved in the more distant third person. But hey, this was 1819. I think this was about as sexy as you could get in England at that time—and then some.

Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 


Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer