Based on a True Story

Based on a True Story

I had a conversation with my grandmother the other day about how unfortunate she thought it was that the movie The Help wasn’t a true story. Or even based on one. If you haven’t seen the movie, it tells the story of several black maids and their white female employers in the south in the 1960’s. The main (white) character is a writer and she uses the story of the abused maids to propel her away from her racist hometown into the New York City big time.

Although the specifics of the movie are not true, the generalities of the movie are. Black women were often given no other option but to become maids, replicating the duties of the pre-emancipated south. They were verbally mistreated and subjected to humiliations like the blacks-only toilet suggested by one of the white ladies in the movie.

Who is to say that the plot of this movie doesn’t more accurately represent the situation at this period than a story that very loosely recreates the specifics of an event, still claiming the based on a true story label?

I started thinking about this idea when I watched Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan back-to-back in one war-filled week. Band of Brothers is billed as a true story about World War II and the famous 101st Airborne Division. Stephen Ambrose, the writer of the book on which the movie was based, has been charged with taking liberalities with his book, including saying that one man on which the an episode of the series centers died more than twenty years before he actually did.

Saving Private Ryan—Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks’ bloody World War II vehicle—is based loosely on fact, and isn’t billed as a true story. The movie centers on a dangerous mission to retrieve one man, Private Ryan, whose three brothers have been killed in combat. The movie, but not the rescue mission itself, is based on the story of the Niland brothers, four brothers who all fought in the war. All but one of the brothers was presumed dead, but another brother eventually made it back to New York after being held prisoner in a POW camp. No rescue mission came to save the final Niland brother, and Spielberg was more inspired by a monument for eight siblings who were casualties of the American Civil War than the Nilands' story.

The miniseries certainly has truth in it, but is it necessarily more truthful than Saving Private Ryan? Is a “true” story simply more marketable than a fictional tale (perhaps Saving Private Ryan is an anomaly)?

What do you think?