The biopic is a curious beast. If it treats its subject too kindly, there's very little to keep the audience engaged for 90 minutes. Tear him or her to shreds and you risk destroying the enigma which caused people to come and see the film in the first place.
Mr Nice, the story of celebrated cannabis smuggler Howard Marks, which is based on the autobiography of the same name, comes along at an interesting time for the campaign to legalise the drug. In 1996, when the book itself was published, the nation was moving towards a less stringent attitude towards dope. As a student, I remember getting excited when The Independent began its legalisation campaign in 1997. And when the government downgraded the substance to Grade C in 2002, it seemed only a matter of time before we saw Amsterdam-style coffee shops on the streets of London, Birmingham and Manchester.
But as the first trailer for Mr Nice hits the web, I can't help thinking that the timing is somewhat unfortunate. Two years ago the Independent said it was wrong to push for the drug to be legalised, and even in liberal circles we seem to have moved back towards the attitude that cannabis, particularly high-strength skunk, does cause enough harm that it ought to remain illegal.
The trailer, which shows Rhys Ifans as Marks and Chloë Sevigny as his wife, Judy, seems to depict Marks as a charismatic, freewheeling chancer, the decent sort of drug dealer; one who never dealt with guns, violence or more damaging substances. It's very much in line with the book.
But if the eventual movie is to transcend whimsical Brit-com territory - at least one commentator has remarked on the trailer's resemblance to the recent Richard Curtis's The Boat that Rocked - it will need to show us the dark side of Marks's sense of invincibility: the egocentric personality that allowed him to believe he could outsmart the authorities time after time despite being out of his brain on weed whenever he wasn't actually asleep.
Marks and his wife both, eventually, ended up behind bars on the opposite side of the world from their children - he for seven years, she for two. I'm not suggesting for a second that the film ought to peer down upon him from upon high as he gets his comeuppance, but whether cannabis should be illegal or not, Marks continued with his heroic attempts to enrich himself long beyond the point when the odds were in his favour. And ultimately, his family suffered for it.
It's also worth remembering that Howard Marks is a drug dealer, not a musician, an actor or a painter. While Johnny Cash and Ray Charles, both recipients of recent biopics which portrayed them as flawed geniuses, leave behind songs that crystallise their brilliance while forgiving various personality traits, Marks's main legacy is likely to be a greater tendency towards short-term memory loss in the general UK population.
But perhaps I'm being a kill-joy. Are you looking forward to Mr Nice? And is Marks a suitable subject for hagiography? Do you expect the film to tell it straight, or stick to the positive line pushed in the book?
