| A Capsule Guide to Docudramas
by Steve Lipkin |
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One need look no further than any issue of TV Guide to find evidence of the immense popularity of docudrama. Feature film docudrama has expanded beyond the traditional turf of the biopic (Spike Lee's Malcolm X; Tina Turner's trials in What's Love Got to Do With It) to personalize broad social issues (the Oliver Stone/Jim Garrison "outlaw history" of the Kennedy assassination in JFK; the holocaust in Schindler's List; the victim's view of the British legal system in In The Name of the Father). |
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 Recent features range from women's professional baseball (A League of Their Own) to medical breakthroughs (Awakenings) to naval history (The Bounty). TV movies-of-the-week bring front page news stories to living rooms with astonishing rapidity. Beyond the usual disease-of-the-week offerings audiences can relive vicariously disasters (The Tragedy of Flight 103: The Inside Story), abuse (The Boys of St. Vincent), ill-fated affairs (The Amy Fisher Story [ABC]/Amy Fisher: My Story [NBC]/Casualties of Love: The Long Island Lolita Story [CBS]), and contemporary courtroom spectacles (Honor Thy Father and Mother: The True Story of the Menendez Murders [Fox]/Menendez: A Killing in Beverly Hills [CBS]; The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader Murdering Mom). |
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Why is a form capable of covering such a huge range of characters,
topics and events so appealing? The sense that these films provide an
inside view of how something might have "really" happened offers only a
partial answer. A film may stem from well-known figures, events, or
published accounts, but notoriety is not necessarily essential in order
to reach an audience.
Docudrama fuses documentary material with melodrama, so that much of
its strength must result from its emphasis on emotion, its preference
for family iconography, and the power of its argument for a moral view
of reality-based subject matter. In the Name of the Father, for
example, examines Irish/English political tensions through their impact
on the Conlon family as it condemns unjust British suppression.
Schindler's factory workers become the family he saves from destruction
in Nazi concentration camps. The title of A League of Their Own
suggests how teams of women ballplayers struggled to overcome barriers
to success, only to find it temporary, brought to an end with the end of
the war and the return of men to resume their "rightful" places at
work, and women theirs, at home.
Like melodrama generally, docudrama argues that lost or elusive moral
perspectives can be regained. While the actuality a work recreates may
show the exercise of right and wrong thrown into jeopardy, the
docudramatization of actual people, incidents and events ultimately
restores a sense of a moral system at work. The world here can still be
a place where on some scale, in some way, the struggle for a balance
between right and wrong attains
coherence.
A few sample docudramas on video:
Photo Credits: HBO Home Video.
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