1998’s Gia has endured as an all-time great biopic.
What makes Michael Cristofer’s Gia so heartbreaking is that it’s not just tragedy porn. The biopic captures model Gia Carangi’s (Angelina Jolie) life in a broad spectrum of deep, nasty lows and contrasting dazzling heights. The 1998 drama sees her for all that she was — both a cautionary tale and an aspirational all-American — not just a woman defined by her untimely death.
Society is now more aware of how susceptible people are often chewed up and spat out by the industries they dedicate themselves to. Whether they self-destructed or were encouraged to by vampiric manipulators in their shallow social circles, society rarely afforded compassion to the washed up superstars of yesteryear.
With the recent onslaught of socially-aware biopics sparked by the billion dollar success of Bohemian Rhapsody, looking to a late 90s TV movie to sensitively depict the trials of a drug-addicted, bisexual, supermodel who died by AIDS sounds dubious. But so much of why Gia works is because it’s not particularly sensitive – its dramatization is raw and candid, like its subject was.
During the two hours of montages, fuck-ups, and endearing character moments, Gia’s loud personality and hypnotic presence deteriorates. Her larger-than-life charisma is eaten alive by cocaine-fuelled benders and low-lifes exploiting her talent. But as much as writers Jay McInerney and Cristofer spotlight all sorts of ‘users,’ they don’t cower away from the accountability of Carangi’s regrettable choices.
Cristofer lets us into Gia’s life enough to love her, but never close enough to be within arm’s reach. Even when we see her at her most vulnerable, Jolie maintains a level of mystery. Gia doesn’t claim to understand every thought that went through Carangi’s head, nor does it plaster its own beliefs onto her too heavily. You’re allowed to perceive her, but never fully know her.
This slight distance could have been a problem if not for Jolie’s interpretation. She’s cagey and aggressive at the right times, and pitiable when the story drives home the depths of her addiction. It’s a messy portrayal with surprisingly little vanity given she steps into the role of a supermodel.
However, Gia’s greatest love, Linda (Elizabeth Mitchell), also deserves credit for the texture. It would have been easy for Mitchell to be drowned out by Jolie’s work, especially with Gia being firmly the lead. But Mitchell’s lovable girl next door, who’s afforded some messiness herself, is a perfect counterweight.
Where Gia is immature, Linda has an old soul quality. When Gia creates a mess, Linda is there to tidy it up. Gia’s addiction takes hold of her quickly, so their relationship is, of course, toxic and messy. Linda enables Gia by constantly forgiving her, and Gia puts Linda through hell by refusing to let her go. Their only true commonality is that they fall fast and hard for each other.
Gia doesn’t pretend this is a fairy tale. In fact, the ups and downs of their affair account for the story’s most gut-wrenching moments. Gia is never less likable than she is when she’s choosing heroin over Linda, and Linda is the audience’s vehicle for every sliver of disappointment and anger toward her girlfriend.
Their courting, and the back and forth between Gia and her mother, Kathleen (Mercedes Ruehl), are the film’s emotional centers. These two fraught relationships humanize Gia and help us mourn her disappearing personhood as she sinks deeper into her addiction. When the model is all but lost during her worst years, eyes glazed over and often cruel, Kathleen and Linda’s roles become paramount.
Jolie and Mitchell were incredibly committed to these characters, and Cristofer’s filmmaking isn’t icky or gratuitous, even during the sexiest scenes. He respected this aspect of Carangi’s life, and didn’t make it a footnote as other directors in the late 90s might have.
Gia’s music and editing have their share of iffy moments. The frame rate sometimes slows to give a drunken effect, with the experience overstaying its welcome, and Terence Blanchard’s original score sounds like it’s straight out of a porno. While the fades to white and record scratch-style shot replays are awkward, the hazy film photography, gorgeous costumes and makeup are fabulous. You feel as if you could reach out and touch the things on screen, despite the otherworldly vapidity of the photography assistants and their leather pants.
While much of Gia is ‘love it or hate it,’ Cristofer splitting the film into part real-time account and part pseudo-documentary is inspired. Talking head-style ‘interviews’ and documentarian filmmaking lend context throughout, with best friend T.J. (Eric Michael Cole), Kathleen, and Linda describing their impressions of who Gia was, the accelerating choices she made, and her eventual downfall.
The cast sells it fantastically, and ensures it isn’t silly. They frequently pause mid-thought because of lumps in their throats, laugh when their character remembers something funny, and characterization is consistent throughout the past and present. (This wasn’t the first time Cristofer interweaved the meat of a true story with dreamlike scenes, playing them against each other — his 1978 play Black Angel detailed a real incident in France with invented memories added for substance.)
The structure gives us an opportunity to empathize with every supporting character. Like when Kathleen — in her own right an intriguing and fallible person — directly confronts how the narrative inevitably frames her, inviting us to blame her. Because losses this miserable are easier to swallow when there’s a clear and simple villain. We look for reasons and meaning, when sometimes life is simply cruel beyond salvaging. It’s a sobering scene that takes the audience’s temperature. It challenges us to sustain our resentment despite the fact Kathleen has suffered and acknowledged her mistakes, in her own flawed way.
Many biopics try to make you feel like you’re there while history is being made, but Gia’s approach is unique — half grounded, half fantasy. Gia’s naïveté and meteoric ’70s rise in the modelling industry is the stuff of dreams; yet Cristofer reels us back onto solid ground when the model’s life is excavated without Gia’s glamorous presence to smooth things over. Through her own eyes, life has a Vaseline-rubbed lens over it, especially when she moves to New York City. The “too big to fail” (or “too beautiful to die,” as the promotional tagline put it) mentality she rests her future on is challenged by the humbling, opposing idea of “the bigger they are, the harder they fall.”
The framed-as-a-documentary stylistic choice is startling on a first viewing; it flirts with melodrama and has the potential to be too off-kilter because it contrasts the movie’s otherwise gritty approach. But it works despite visible seams because sometimes the best we can do is create a patchwork quilt of someone’s life, stitched together by unreliable narrators and journal scraps.
Carangi’s death from AIDS-related complications in 1986 at 26 hits like a wrecking ball, but is handled admirably. However fictionalized Gia may be, it affords her mountains of dignity. In the middle of this fantastical and coarse tale was a real woman who really suffered, something it vows not to forget.
The gristlier details of how Gia’s body failed her and the loneliness she experienced during her final days doesn’t pull punches. It’s brutal watching her restart her life back home with Kathleen, finally get clean, only to be sideswiped by something else entirely. She must reckon with herself and how she ended up there as her hair thins and color drains.
Gia is a project that exists to sear her memory into our brains, giving her a kind of immortality. This wasn’t a woman the world should forget, so the blunt-force approach is forgiven. And unlike many biopics, the deep respect for Carangi (and people who rotted while the world recoiled from them during the ’80s) is clear as day.
Its last images aren’t her skeletal frame or weeping family and friends, it’s Gia luminous again — literally walking away from her deathbed like she’s on her way to her next life. Cristofer memorializes Carangi how she should be remembered — radiant, rough-edged, eternal, unbelievably alive.
