Shots in the dark: in the midst of special-effects season, a handful of movies bring the action back down to earth

It is a truth universally acknowledged that movies about great writers must be in want of beautiful actors, three-act structures, and audiences' willingness to believe the writers' lives were as eventful as their works. So it is in the improbable Becoming Jane, starring Anne Hathaway as a spiky Jane Austen, and in the delicious Moliere, starring Romain Duris as a madcap version of the French actor-dramatist.

Opening during this summer's postblockbuster lull, these films generate their own kind of excitement.

In Becoming Jane, directed by Julian Jarrold, the aspiring novelist slugs a cricket ball farther than was anticipated by her ardent admirer, Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy), then glimpses him skinny-dipping. They eventually kiss in a nocturnal scene that could have been lit by the 18th-century painter Joseph Wright.

In Moliere, directed by Laurent Tirard, the hero is hired by a wealthy oaf (Fabrice Luchini) who wants to learn acting in hope of attracting a mistress. In a magnificent bit of business, a strutting and whinnying Moliere shows his patron how to imitate a horse. Moliere climbs down the wall of the man's chateau and spies on his beautiful wife, Elmire (Laura Morante), as she prepares for bed--with a mean guard dog waiting for him to complete his descent. Once they become lovers Moliere rains kisses on her, pressing her against her bedroom wall; their passion transcends the farce.

Both biopics wildly speculate that their protagonists matured as artists by using their writings to assuage their romantic disappointments and that their characters were directly modeled on the people in their private dramas. This is made explicit in a very moving performance of Moliere's Tartuffe at the end of Tirard's film. In Becoming Jane it's more implicit: Austen fans will have a ball spotting the prototypes for such characters as Pride & Prejudice's Mr. Darcy, Mrs. Bennet, and Lady Catherine de Bourg, and Emma's Mr. Elton. The screenwriters' assumptions that Moliere and Austen were driven by the desire to fulfill their own wishes is reasonable, if overdetermined, and it's to their credit that they show how love left its scorch marks on both.

Biopics often succeed because they pull the great and the terrible from their pedestals, enabling us to identify with them. Intimacy with Moliere, Jane Austen, the Marquis de Sade, Virginia Woolf, Hitler, and Ray Charles can't fail to illuminate. I had little affinity for Johnny Cash until I saw the spine-tingling scene in Walk the Line (2005) where Joaquin Phoenix's Cash tentatively plays "Folsom Prison Blues" for producer Sam Phillips. Even more than the film's psychological backstory--the death of Cash's brother and his father's displacing his fury onto Johnny--that moment of striving at Sun Studios made us care about the singer. That's what good biopics do--they throw in sparks of genius, madness, tenderness, or cruelty that make you consider the real life and how it might have been lived.

The biopic is a hardy beast. The last 18 months have brought films about Brian Jones, Bettie Page, Marie Antoinette, Edie Sedgwick, William Wilberforce, Lord Longford, Edith Piaf, Francisco de Goya, and others. Movies that tell the stories of famous people, or purport to, originally proliferated in the '30s after Disraefi (1929) and The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) earned Oscars for members of their respective casts, prompting more films about monarchs, scientists, artists, writers, entertainers, sportsmen, and adventurers. These were mostly stolid, respectful efforts; only Josef von Sternberg's The Scarlet Empress (1934)--which depicted Catherine the Great's journey from naive princess to sexy despot--was truly subversive. Worthiness and propriety are less valued by moviemakers these days, hence the stream of films about antiestablishment, underground, or otherwise troubling figures like Larry Flynt, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Frida Kahlo, Chuck Barris, Bob Kane, Alfred Kinsey, Kurt Cobain, Diane Arbus, and the aforementioned Bettie Page. Lenny (1974) and Wired (1989), about Lenny Bruce and John Belushi, respectively, foretold this trend.

Marion Cotillard's scrappy, soaring portrayal of Edith Piaf makes La Vie En Rose this year's must-see biopic. Like Ray (2004), it's a mess surrounding a giant performance, and thus a fair approximation of Piaf's disordered life. Becoming Jane is more schematic, but it catches fire when Jane and Tom elope. Austen frowned on such transgressions in Pride & Prejudice and Mansfield Park (1999), maybe from fear--but who's to know what fantasies the real Lefroy inspired in her? Moliere wants desperately to elope with Elmire, but she is too much of a realist. Romantic crises steer these comic biopics into dramas full of regret and remind us that the mistakes we make when we're young are usually irrevocable. Such is life.

Graham Fuller is Interview's film writer at large.

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