Truth in Historical Movies

How important is truth in a movie? Especially a movie based on history?

Take The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). One distraught viewer of the movie made this comment on the IMDb movie forums:

"There was a time that I really thought that this movie was excellent. I had given it a 9 star rating. That was before I watched a special on the History Channel with interviews with survivors. I have never watched this movie again, changed my rating to one star, and threw away the VHS tape that I had..."

That one-star rating is a pity. What this person failed to take into account is that the greatness of this movie doesn't lie in the precise facts of the historical setting.

Or, as Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote:

"Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures."

Art is contrived; there's no way around that. The trick is to artistically hide this fact. In a movie like The Bridge on the River Kwai, the story rides between the poles of both fact and fiction. This particular story is really more just a historical document about an event during World War 2. It's about how one man's greatest strength is also his greatest weakness.

A movie's purpose is to tell an engaging story. A great movie both tells an engaging story and strives to communicate a truth.

[Photo courtesy of Dave W. Clarke]