PROLOGUE TO GLORY: Movie Reviews of Southside With You and Sully by Howard Casner

For questions: hcasner@aol.com

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Warning: SPOILERS

rev-1Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

                                                            Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare

When Pauline Kael reviewed Abel Gance’s Napoleon, she talked, somewhat negatively, of Gance’s approach to the future emperor. She said something to the affect that when Napoleon is an adult, Gance treats him as a man of destiny; when the subject is young and in school, he’s presented as a child of destiny.

This isn’t an unusual way to approach biopics of famous people; treating them as archetypes, rather than human beings like anyone else one might meet on the street, an approach closer to what George Bernard Shaw tried to do in such works as Caeser and Cleopatra and St. Joan.

But even Shaw’s plays seem more like the Fast and Furious franchise when compared to Southside With You, the chronicling of an early and ordinary day in the life of two people who later became two of the most powerful people in the world.

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