GIA (1998)
Much like model Gia Carangi’s own short life, this biopic is a lot. It’s a showcase for a young and furious Angelina Jolie; an exuberantly queer love story; a clumsy horror film about addiction; and a prime example of HBO’s brass balls programming during its pre-merger era.
It’s also cheap looking—like Boogie Nights attempted on a Max After Dark budget—and plain wrong, visually, especially given the setting of the fashion world circa-1980. (It was mostly LA shot for New York.) The script is also torn between three incompatible voices: Carangi’s own diaries; literary brat packer Jay McInerney; and playwright turned actor Michael Cristofer, who also directed.
But in that rando mess lie the high caloric joys of the biopic itself. It’s a genre big enough to encompass the extremes of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and Lindsay Lohan’s Liz & Dick, and it will never die, not as long as famous people want to pretend to be other famous people. (As we write this Oppenheimer is second in the box office and Venice has announced Priscilla, Maestro, and Ferrari in their opening lineup.) Add in the most tormented mother-daughter relationship since Imitation of Life and that’s what has brought Emily Schultz and me back to this Philly cheesesteak of a film, year after year.
We love Gia, but with boundaries, the same way you should love all your fucked-up friends.
Brian J Davis: Is Barbie a biopic?
Emily Schultz: I’ll let you know after I see it tomorrow.
BJD: To recap when we were talking earlier about the pull of the biopic. We all know it’s the worst film genre. But I’ve seen Gia at least five times now. Five! And I cried during at least two viewings.
ES: I think of the biopic like a magazine. It’s glossy, it’s all headlines and simple layout and you know you’re not really going to get that much information.
BJD: I also realized the biopic is this bucket where all these old, obvious, just not done anymore storytelling techniques still exist. A biopic from this year could look like one from 50 years ago. It hasn’t changed…. And here’s an example. A title card telling us whose story we’re watching and when it literally began. Gia was born in 1960 in Philadelphia, did you get that Emily?
ES: Hey, I needed that card! Before I saw this the first time I had never heard of Gia.
BJD: The friend interview montage. Who was the subject you ask? Let me tell you a story in a very unnatural way so you can segue. This is in so many biopics and I think it’s because a director gets assigned a biopic, gets depressed, but thinks, Fuck it. I’ll just rip off Citizen Kane. Wait. Here’s Kirkland brand-Anna Wintour telling us Gia changed the world…by being a brunette model!
ES: Mercedes Ruehl as the mother! Boys you lose. Girls you have forever. Not joking. Some of this dialogue is so good.
BJD: Gia is not a bad movie. I mean, I’m now watching this for the sixth time. But let’s set a rule: No serious subject talk. Could I talk about how some of the most genius and coolest people I ever met were destroyed by heroin? Absolutely, but we should not take this movie seriously. That would be completely missing the message of this failed message movie.
ES: Are there any biopics with a happy ending? Is it only a tragic genre?
BJD: I think we can divide biopics into high biopic and low biopic. Low biopic tries to capture the entire sweep of a life, usually badly: like, let’s go all the way back to childhood trauma and slinging cheesesteaks. High biopics, like Spencer, will zero in on that one decisive story or moment. Oh great, now they’re signifying that Gia was a punk by using…The Pretenders! I guess the GG Allin sync license was too expensive.
ES: Look at Angelina’s hair.
BJD: G-G-G-Gia Pet!
ES: Wait! How’d they end up in a threesome?
BJD: Her and her totally made-up for the script boyfriend were picked up by the photographer at a club. And you know my pet peeve is period incorrect costume and hair, right? This is supposed to be 1978 and they all look like they’re guesting on an episode of Friends in 1998.
ES: How old is Angelina Jolie here? [Checks Wikipedia] Oh my god. I can’t believe I didn’t know this. Jon Voight is her father?
BJD: You didn’t know that?
ES: Now I can’t unsee it!
BJD: Carving her name in Wilhelmina Cooper’s receptionist desk with a switchblade. Now I remember why this is a sixth viewing. Wait, she’s not going to bounce from one mother figure to another is she?
ES: I wouldn’t know anything about that.
BJD: Can I tell the story of when you said this week, so earnestly, Is this a straight actress playing gay? Should we address that?
ES: Yes, because apparently, I don’t know anything about Angelina Jolie.
BJD: She is the Nirvana of 1990s bi-women! Angelina Jolie walked so you could run in Doc Martens. Now the boy briefs scene. I hope this was a moment of realization for many viewers.
ES: This line! Have you ever had sex with a man? Yeah, once. And? And I could have done that with a German shepherd. I wish this film had more lines like this.
BJD: Everything you’re about to see during this shoot is true. That photographer is supposed to be Christoph von Wangenheim. He was the punk version of Helmut Newton and it was his photos in Eyes of Laura Mars.
ES: Making out naked through a chain link fence—
BJD: That’s Amore! Technical note about the bad slow motion. This is all fake slow motion, repeating frames in the lab during post, not done in-camera where you should do it. That’s why it’s jumpy and looks like a Canadian rock video circa 1990. That says to me there were many, many attempts at re-editing this film to make it something that wasn’t what they filmed.
ES: Tired: Walk of shame. Wired: Naked conversation with your date in the hallway as your neighbors go to work.
BJD: This conversation. Why does everyone leave me! This is the true mark of the low biopic. Hanging a character on a single psychological hook. Don’t be another woman who abandons me…LIKE MY MOTHER DID! IN THE OPENING SCENE!
ES: Here’s the cue for one of my favorite parts of biopics. Party montages!
BJD: This is a truly cheap and minimal Studio 54 set. It’s almost avant-garde, like the Dogville set.
ES: Summer is blonde. Winter is carnivorous. I kind of love fake Anna Wintour.
BJD: Back home to visit her mother with her first Vogue cover. This is where I get emotionally invested in this film. She’s doing this for her shitty mother and I want to reach into the screen and say, “Gia, you owe her nothing. Don’t do this for her. It’s for yourself.”
ES: After this they really take the story’s ownership away from Gia.
BJD: That happens every time they jump to interviews. It becomes a slog to watch and it’s all because there’s this search for a deeper-structure in a biopic. There are great scenes with great actors that I wish the edit would let breathe a little more without the fake excitement.
ES: This meltdown with the mother. I want to tell her, “Gia, you don’t need her. You have money, just hire an assistant to help with your life!”
BJD: But Gia needs the love that was unattainable in her childhood from everyone she meets—there’d be no biopic without that!
ES: Okay, so where’s my biopic?!
BJD: Edmund Genest as Francesco Scavullo. Amazing, solid character performance that captures Scavullo’s genuine love and care for Gia. You all hate-a Gia because she is-a more beautiful than you. I have to start directing like that!
ES: He’s great. If you do not-a like it, vanish from my world.
BJD: How do you feel about the childhood journal voice over?
ES: I feel like this movie could have made some choices. Diary voiceover, or the dramatized documentary. But not both.
BJD: Faye Dunaway’s funeral. I didn’t realize she was that sick. It’s so hard to tell with Germans.
ES: This is a great scene. Bitchy fashion funeral. This film is so much better at this than anything “serious.”
BJD: It’s a mix of the camp that they know that they’re doing, and the camp that they don’t know they’re doing.
ES: So which parts do you cry at?
BJD: It’s coming soon. Don’t get me wrong. There are magnificent scenes that are only ever so slightly off. Like this one! Gia leaves mid-photoshoot on a motorcycle to score and then she mainlines for the first time. All set to “The Killing Moon.” Great scene, great song, but the combination is slightly “off.” Compare that to the holy shit moment of seeing the “Sister Christian” scene in Boogie Nights for the first time. Biopics have to find a coherent culture to represent, not just an individual. This movie never finds its culture.
ES: She’s driving through our neighborhood to score! This is like whenever Blue Bloods rents our building to be a “scary” set.
BJD: This is literally one of two actual New York shots in the film. And now we’re back in Burbank.
ES: This drug dealer looks like every man I dated in the ’90s. Maybe I did date him?
BJD: And here’s my crying scene. Her girlfriend tells her to choose: me or heroin. And her girlfriend realizes she was not ready for the answer Gia gives her and now regrets asking. So well-acted, quietly filmed, and painfully real. We are in this room these two women.
ES: And no jumpy edits to ruin it.
BJD: Elsewhere, I suspect “producer meddling” in the edit room. There’s really aggressive editing in this film.
ES: Sometimes it’s effective. Sometimes—
BJD: Now Gia has a new super sleazy modeling agent who is totally not supposed to be John Casablancas. Okay. Don’t you wish agents were as sleazy in real life as they are in films? Like, a little bit? I find most entertainment agents are actually as grounded, depressed, and as ineffective as we, the talent, are.
ES: God, you’re right!
BJD: Here’s another question. Did her mother love Gia? Or did she love her fame?
ES: I think, maybe both. I mean, as a woman—
BJD: That sounds like serious talk. We swore we wouldn’t take this film seriously.
ES: Okay. This one time. AS A WOMAN… the things we do and accomplish, we think that nothing can be good enough and that complicates the mother-daughter relationship.
BJD: This is probably the best, ice-cold, scene in the film: Gia bottoming out in Germany. She’s on the nod while cruel nameless Germans are positioning her around the set like a doll.
ES: It’s a Barbie world but I don’t think she’s feeling like a Barbie girl right now.
BJD: I wonder if a scene like this will be in Barbie.
ES: I’ll tell you tomorrow after I see it.
BJD: Group therapy scene. Girl, Interrupted, foreshadowed!
ES: She’s calling her girlfriend from rehab to make amends. I’m going to cry. I am crying.
BJD: Go for it. Have a Gia cry! You’ll feel better! Okay. This new scene is a perfectly horrible biopic moment. They put all of Gia’s progressing AIDS symptoms—
ES: Into one scene!
BJD: Oh mom, it’s just acne… No, mom, I’m just feeling tired… Now that you mention it, I am a little dizzy. Boom. Then the hospital.
ES: You’re not joking. That really is the scene.
BJD: Now the old boyfriend who has no name has a big acting scene that is somewhat unearned.
ES: Smashing a hospital chair!
BJD: Unless people from Philadelphia really hate furniture?
ES: This is how films unravel. They forget what, and who, to focus on.
BJD: The key to a script—or a novel, or a performance—is to make choices, right? The biopic is the total opposite of that! It usually makes no choices, whatsoever!
[Emily starts crying again.]
BJD: It’s okay to Gia-cry.
ES: This whole final part.
BJD: …And it’s not done well! Given the subjects and scenes they’re doing—you can’t mess them up.
ES: Gia on her deathbed telling her mother I forgive you. I thought her mother was going to respond—
BJD: “For what?” I totally had the same thought!
ES: That’s exactly what I thought she was going to say. It would have been much more truthful to the character…And most mothers.
BJD: The end fantasy sequence. Gia is beautiful again and tended by a chorus line in hazmat suits.
ES: I think it’s kind of great.
BJD: This film begins by ripping off Citizen Kane, then ends with All That Jazz! I cannot keep up with how messy this film is.
ES: This could play on a great double bill with Midnight Cowboy.
BJD: The “don’t move to New York” double bill.
LET GIA RIP YOUR HEART OUT AT MAX