How to write a Good Biopic?

    The opening of Michael worried me. It begins with Michael Jackson as a child, and for a moment I feared that screenwriter John Logan had fallen into the same trap as Ahmed Mourad, the writer of the disaster that is El Set (The Lady - new Egyptian Movie about Umm Kulthoum) —I refuse to call it a film—which also opens with Umm Kulthum as a little girl. It was an interesting coincidence that, within just a few months two biopics is released about two legendary singers—one Arab, one global—were released in the same year. But Michael has a clear dramatic reason for beginning with its protagonist as a child: Michael's main conflict is with his abusive, domineering father. Showing him as a child suffering under that abuse allows us to understand his later desire to break free from his father's control. El Set, on the other hand, begins with Umm Kulthum as a child simply because the writer wanted it to. There is no dramatic justification whatsoever. Even more absurdly, during those childhood scenes, the real protagonist is her father, not her. If the story truly demanded it, the film could have approached Umm Kulthum's life through another character entirely. That's exactly what the writers of Loving Vincent did. Rather than making Vincent van Gogh the protagonist, they told his story through another character investigating the mystery surrounding Vincent's death. They avoided the trap that other writers fell into in works such as At Eternity's Gate, another Van Gogh biopic. From a dramatic standpoint, Vincent van Gogh simply does not function well as a protagonist—not because he isn't interesting, but because the ideal dramatic treatment of his life is precisely what Loving Vincent accomplished. The same principle appears in Naguib Mahfouz's novel Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth (Alaa'sh Fi Alhaqiqa), where Akhenaten's story is reconstructed through a protagonist who meets the people who once knew him.

    This brings us to another question: who is the protagonist of The Voice of Hind Rajab? From the opening until well past the midpoint, I assumed Omar was the protagonist. Then I began asking myself: what is Omar's dramatic flaw? What inner weakness is supposed to change by the end of the journey as he struggles to rescue a little girl trapped under the Israeli occupation? When I couldn't identify any such flaw, I assumed that director and writer Kaouther Ben Hania had done what Reginald Rose did in 12 Angry Men: making the antagonist—not the protagonist—undergo the transformation. Juror No. 3 begins as a stubborn man projecting his resentment toward his own son onto the young defendant, but by the end he admits the boy is innocent. The protagonist himself undergoes virtually no dramatic transformation, yet he remains the protagonist because he drives the story and leads the effort to persuade the other jurors. That led me to think that the antagonist: Mahdi —the hospital director in The Voice of Hind Rajab— was the character who would change. But neither of them does. Neither the protagonist nor the antagonist experiences any meaningful transformation. Instead, the screenplay simply shifts from one protagonist to another!! Suddenly, Rana takes over the narrative during roughly the final quarter of the film. I genuinely couldn't understand what the screenplay was trying to do. It seems Ben Hania wanted to recreate the real events exactly as they happened, without shaping them according to the dramatic principles required by narrative cinema. If that was her intention, she should have made a documentary. If necessary, she could have incorporated reenacted scenes, creating what we call a docudrama—while still respecting the basic rules of dramatic storytelling. What frustrated me even more was a conversation with a friend who loved the film and recommended it to me. When I asked him who the protagonist was, he answered, "The protagonist is Hind Rajab's voice!" No. In drama, protagonists are characters. Forget the cliché that "the place is the protagonist," or "time is the protagonist," or "nature is the protagonist." These are merely metaphors used to describe the importance of those elements within a story. But the rule remains the same: if you're writing a film, you need a protagonist around whom the story revolves—a character engaged in conflict, confronting obstacles while burdened by a flaw that is ultimately overcome by the end of the story, if they are a conventional heroes. Take Cobb in Christopher Nolan's Inception. His journey culminates in overcoming the guilt he carries over his wife's death. Or consider a anti-hero, whose flaws intensify instead of being resolved, such as Jaafar Al-Rawi in Naguib Mahfouz's Heart of the Night (Qalb Allail), who descends into madness because of his obsessive pursuit of absolute freedom. Hind Rajab's voice cannot be a protagonist because it is not a person. Nor can Hind Rajab herself function as a dramatic protagonist—not because she never physically appears on screen, but because she simply does not engage in dramatic conflict or undergo transformation. A protagonist does not have to appear on screen to drive the story. In The Message, the Prophet Muhammad never appears on screen at all, yet he remains the central dramatic force. Every major event revolves around him. He stands in direct conflict with Abu Sufyan and his followers until that conflict reaches its resolution, culminating in Abu Sufyan's conversion to Islam and acknowledgment that Muhammad is truly God's Messenger.

    One final observation about the difference between Michael and El Set: Michael ends its story when Michael finally separates himself from his father and brothers. That decision alone demonstrates genuine dramatic craftsmanship. John Logan understands that a drama ends when its central conflict ends—not necessarily when the protagonist dies or retires from his career. El Set falls into exactly the opposite trap. It simply continues recounting episodes from Umm Kulthum's life long after the dramatic conflict has been exhausted, with most of those episodes contributing virtually nothing to the story. In fact, the film could have been condensed to focus almost entirely on its final fifteen minutes. As I argued in a previous article, those closing scenes function largely as an emotional distraction, convincing audiences that they have watched a coherent film, thereby encouraging them to forgive more than two hours of dramatically empty, directionless storytelling.