James Dean (2001)

Idea: A romanticised telling of the life of James Dean (James Franco). After his mother dies when James is nine, and Winton Dean (Michael Moriarty) ships his son back to Indiana. He doesn't see him again until after his high school graduation. Winton again abandons James when he decides to pursue a career in acting instead of business. James moves to New York, where he is befriended by Martin Landau (Sam Gould). When Elia Kazan (Enrico Colantoni) offers James the part in East of Eden, James moves back to California, where he falls in love with Pier Angeli (Valentina Cervi).

April takes issue with the biopic! Two issues, actually:

1) I don't understand why all biopics have to be so Freudian. I recognize that Freud is very pervasive in our times, and especially in our media, but I am just so tired of biopics that boil everything down in some person's life to their relationship with mother and/or father. Yes, those relationships are important. Are they the basis for everything else that will follow in one's life? Biopics sure think so, and Israel Horovitz (writer) has no desire to disagree.

2) Absolution. Whomever it is, whatever they have done, people in biopics always seem to be concerned with absolving their subject for their past indiscretions. Can absolution really be found in a conversation, a sentence, an utterance? Probably not. It's still worth a try.

I have never seen Franco so inhabit a role either before or since. He may not possess Dean's sheer physical presence, but he, for a brief, shining moment, was touched by the same greatness that haunted Dean.

I don't understand why the pic glosses over Rebel Without a Cause, though. I would have liked to see Sal Mineo and Natalie Wood as well. Oh, well.

Next to Franco the rest of them fade from memory, which is probably what it was like to work with Dean himself. Moriarty is a close second as a father with a secret, and Colantoni made a pretty good Kazan. Edward Herrmann has some pretty choice lines as Raymond Massey.

But that Franco. Why can't he reproduce this intensity in any of his other work? B+