Screening out genius

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We've been fascinated by the mystery of artistic creativity since long before Giorgio Vasari published his illuminating — and gossipy — "Lives of the Artists" in 1550.

But a twentieth-century medium has proved particularly popular in delving into the complicated world of artistic genius, from Irving Stone's 1965 film "The Agony and the Ecstasy" to Milos Forman's 1984 "Amadeus."

This summer alone sees three movies about artists amidst the sequels and blockbusters. "Becoming Jane," about England's greatest female novelist, opens next week. "Goya's Ghosts," about one of Spain's greatest painters, opened earlier this month. "Moliere," about France's greatest dramatist, opens here Aug. 17.

It's too bad that two of these three movies about artistic geniuses almost completely ignore their genius.

Movies about artists always have been a little bit salacious. Creators tend to live unconventional lives, after all, and it's fun to watch great figures doing all the things we mere mortals could never get away with doing. We usually try to justify our curiosity about artists' personal lives by emphasizing its importance to the art.

That's certainly what the frothy costume piece "Becoming Jane" does. Jane Austen's six completed novels have been the basis of dozens of films, but this marks the first time her own life has been on the big screen — at least, two screenwriters' idea of her life.

Austen (played by Anne Hathaway) famously never married and never strayed far from the family homes in Hampshire and Bath. Yet on the basis of scant evidence — brief mentions in two letters — screenwriters have imagined that the author of "Pride and Prejudice" had a grand, doomed romance of her own, with Irish law student Tom Lefroy.

"Becoming Jane" is a fun movie for Austen fans. Screenwriters cleverly have inserted references to the novels in the film, imagining how Austen got elements of her novels from her own life.

Think of it as a "Shakespeare in Love" for the writer most often compared to Shakespeare.

The problem is that those works — in which Austen manifests a knowledge of human nature to rival that of the Bard — don't play an important role in the film. "Becoming Jane" makes an interesting (fictional) argument about why money and marriage are so central to Austen's work. However, it doesn't explore why writing was so central to Austen's life. Indeed, Jane tells her sister that she's ready to give up writing entirely if she can only be married to the man she loves.

The thrust of the film is that Jane Austen needed to experience love and loss to be able to write about it. As Austen scholar Deirdre Le Faye told London's Telegraph, "It's like saying Shakespeare murdered people to give him enough information to write 'Macbeth.' " The mystery of how genius was shaped from such thin raw material is never explored. We see the birth of a lover but never the birth of an author.

At least "Becoming Jane" is actually about Jane Austen, however fictional the story. "Goya's Ghosts" reduces the titular artist to a mere sleuth in a missing-persons case that barely involves him.

It's a disappointing film coming from Milos Forman, who made one of the greatest films ever about the mystery of artistic creativity, "Amadeus." That film was partly about how a vulgar man could compose some of the most heavenly music ever written. "Goya's Ghosts" could have been as good, exploring how a popular court painter became a social reformer, almost inventing modern art in the process. However, Goya (played by Stellan Skarsgard) is only a witness to the events around him — mostly centered on the Spanish Inquisition, of which, in fact, he almost became a victim.

Like the makers of "Becoming Jane," Mr. Forman seems more interested in a melodramatic version of the events that might have inspired Goya than an exploration of the genius that turned them into art.

"Moliere" is just like "Becoming Jane" in that it takes a period of the playwright's life about which little is known and imagines it as the inspiration for all the works to come. Moliere (played by Romain Duris) is sprung from debtors prison by a rich man who wants the artist to help him perform a play to win the heart of a popular young widow. Moliere poses as a man of the cloth named Tartuffe (sound familiar?) to fool the man's wife, with whom Moliere soon falls in love. It's a love story — as these films inevitably are — but though frivolous, it actually sheds some light on Moliere's development as an artist.

Moliere is a terrible tragedian, but he has Things to Say and looks down at the comedies he performs just for money. His new lover helps teach the budding playwright that comedies can instruct while they entertain. That insight underlies Moliere's emergence as one of the greatest playwrights of all time.

In linking biography to art to create a literary comedy, "Becoming Jane" and "Moliere" might have been inspired by the Oscar-winning 1998 film "Shakespeare in Love." All three films are immensely enjoyable to watch, especially for those who can spot the allusions, but only "Moliere" places the artist's genius in a wider context.

It's fun — but relatively easy — to place pieces of an artist's work in that artist's life. It's much harder — but more interesting — to suggest how those elements of biography combined with the impossible-to-fully-explain element of genius to produce works that have something lasting to say about human nature. Films like "Shakespeare" show us who might have been the model for Juliet, but they don't begin to imagine how a not-well-educated glover's son gave her some of the most touching poetry in the English language.

Then again, genius is kind of intimidating. Maybe that's why we need movies like "Becoming Jane." Envisioning the author as the heroine of the sort of chick-lit novel her works are inspiring at an amazing rate takes inexplicable brilliance and scales that genius down to reassuringly human dimensions.