When I was about 16, a group of friends and I caught the train to West Geelong.
Wait! I'm not finished. We were there to see Spice Force: The Australian Spice Girls Experience play at the local basketball stadium.
Given that the real Spice Girls evidently had no plans to visit Australia, this was the next best thing, and indeed, it was pretty good, aside from the perplexing fact that the "Sporty Spice" performer (who sounded exactly like Mel C) looked more like Victoria Beckham. (The "Posh Spice" looked and sounded like nothing of the sort.)
It was a fun day out, but in the end, just an example of expert impersonation - we experienced no musical epiphanies or pop-induced ecstasies; instead, we nodded our heads enthusiastically, noting that, yes, that was a very good impression of
Who Do You Think You Are (and so on).
I thought about Spice Force, of all things, last night when I left the cinema following the utterly bewildering
The Iron Lady.
On a large promotional standee in the foyer, Streep-as-Thatcher stared down exiting patrons, accompanied by choice soundbites from the various British reviews of the film; tellingly, Xan Brooks'
Guardian review - "a masterpiece of mimicry" - was prominently typeset.
Because, in the end, that's what it was: Streep, as usual, is much better than the film that surrounds her, and she seems to have amused herself in the midst of Phyllida Lloyd's direction and Abi Morgan's daft script by doing the damned best Margaret Thatcher impersonation the world has ever seen.
(It must be noted however, as we await seeing Leonardo Di Caprio suffocating under mountains of 1980s-style foam latex in
J. Edgar, that the ageing makeup in
The Iron Lady is spectacular and well deserving of this year's relevant Oscars.)
The film is nonsense, really - a twee and sentimentalised view of the Thatcher years that shoehorns her political ascent into some sort of aspirational feminist dramedy; I kept waiting for
Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves to fire up - but, as has been noted everywhere, Streep will no doubt enjoy a rain of statuettes for her performance.
Why?
Mick Lasalle, writing in the
San Francisco Chronicle recently, noted the worrying trend towards handing out Oscars for efforts of impersonating real-life figures. As he put it:
[M]y qualms about this biographical trend go beyond liking or disliking individual performances. I think it indicates a movement away from the imagination.
Just in the past 10 years, six actresses have won the top prize for playing real people: Nicole Kidman (The Hours), Charlize Theron (Monster), Reese Witherspoon (I Walk the Line), Helen Mirren (The Queen), Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose) and Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side). Seven others were nominated. In 2010, none of the female nominees played a real person, probably allowing Natalie Portman (The Swan) to win the Academy Award this year.
Best actor shows similar numbers. Since 2001, six out of 10 best-actor prizes went for real-people performances: Adrien Brody (The Pianist), Jamie Foxx (Ray), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Capote), Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland), Sean Penn (Milk) and Colin Firth (The King's Speech). Thirteen others were nominated.
As he goes on to note, the Academy has always had a soft spot for the biopic, but I agree wholeheartedly with Lasalle's assessment of the bio trend as indicating a dearth of imagination in filmmaking.
The other question that must be asked, in the end, is whether or not it really is good acting? Any sod can sit down with a dialect coach and a good SFX artist for a few weeks and come out the other side looking and sounding like the object of their actorly affections; hell, there's a whole industry for look-alikes who do just that at corporate events the world over.
Take Whitaker's
Last King Of Scotland and Sandra Bullock's
Blind Side performances; were they really the best performances of the year? Taking the Academy's decisions as some sort of arbiter of filmmaking quality is bound to end in sorrow, but still: neither of those actors are considered to be among the best of their peers, so why the flukes?
It's simple: dundeheads who think that "acting" is about
literally becoming someone else can look at a video of Idi Amin or Leigh Anne Tuohy, then at the actors, and nod sagely and say "Yes, they really nailed it".
The rest of us, as I did upon lights-up at
The Iron Lady yesterday, will just scratch our heads and wonder what just happened.