#Uncontrolled artistic licence movie
#Uncontrolled artistic licence driver

Nearly 30 years ago, many historians were concerned about the fabrications in Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991), which made up a conspiracy behind the murder of John F Kennedy.

Does historical fiction alter our sense of reality? Do film-makers have a responsibility to history? How can we navigate through a world where real and fake information are often blended together? “What is a history student to make of that?” Script reader Gavin Whenman retorted: “How about they conduct actual historical research, rather than watch a film which does not purport to be a documentary?” Yet there are more substantial questions around the public use and understanding of history. “The director of The Favourite, Yorgos Lanthimos, remarked casually that ‘some of the things in the film are accurate and a lot aren’t’,” Jenkins wrote. In this newspaper, Simon Jenkins railed against Vice, The Favourite and Mary Queen of Scots, asking why, at a time when there is so much anxiety about fake news, “fake instant history” is rewarded. Donald Trump attacked First Man for not showing the precise moment when Neil Armstrong planted the US flag on the moon. In a pre-emptive strike, Hannah Greig, historical adviser to The Favourite, admitted that Queen Anne didn’t really keep 17 bunnies in her bedroom, stating that rabbits “were an early-18th-century foodstuff and pest”.

#Uncontrolled artistic licence movie

Simon Schama deplored the fictionalised encounter between Elizabeth I and her cousin in Mary Queen of Scots, tweeting that “the whole drama of Elizabeth and Mary lay in the fact they never did meet – movie has copped out on that”. Director Boots Riley critiqued Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman: “It’s a made-up story in which the false parts of it to try to make a cop the protagonist in the fight against racist oppression.” The historian Fred Kaplan judged that Vice’s historical slant amounted to “what V I Lenin denounced as ‘infantile leftism’”. “I’ve never seen a film distort its facts in such a punitive way,” wrote the critic Mike Ryan of Bohemian Rhapsody. Both are semi-autobiographical: one way of not upsetting someone else’s family is to make a film about your own. The only historical Oscar contenders this year that have not prompted widespread charges of inaccuracy are Roma and Cold War. Photograph: Matt Kennedy/Annapurna/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock View image in fullscreen Amy Adams and Christian Bale in Vice. In a climactic scene, Vallelonga goads Shirley into eating fried chicken for the first time. Forced to spend time with the knockabout, salt-of-the-earth Vallelonga, he chills out. Simultaneously, Shirley is depicted early on as an uptight, prissy snob, out of touch with his own African American community. When he gets to know Shirley, though, and sees the Jim Crow south up close, his sense of justice conquers his prejudice. At the start, Vallelonga is hostile towards black people. Along the way, Shirley is refused service in stores, excluded from restaurants and physically assaulted.

#Uncontrolled artistic licence driver

Green Book tells the story of African American piano virtuoso Donald Shirley (Mahershala Ali) and his Italian American driver Tony Vallelonga (Mortensen) as they undertake a tour of the Deep South in 1962. But arguably none of these has done as much damage as the charge that it misrepresents history. This, despite several PR disasters, including star Viggo Mortensen saying the N-word, stories resurfacing about director Peter Farrelly exposing himself, and a fuss over a 2015 tweet by co-writer Nick Vallelonga about American Muslims cheering on the 9/11 attacks.

Three weeks before the ceremony, its odds remain strong: most bookies currently make it second favourite to win best picture, after Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma. When Green Book won top prize at the Toronto film festival in September, it became an instant Oscar frontrunner.