The maturation of a story’s protagonist—as “growth”
eventuated through the progression of the narrative—provides a source of
dynamism that can keep a film from being static, or falling flat for lack of
character development. At the same time, a good screenwriter is careful not to
overdo it, lest a character’s internal transition occur too quickly in terms of
the story to be believable. In Dallas
Buyers Club, Ron Woodroof—played by Matthew McConaughey—“turns on a dime”
in his attitude toward gays. The flip is hardly believable. The question is
why.
When a physician informs Ron that he has AIDS—beyond being
HIV positive—the rodeo enthusiast and electrician by trade reacts vehemently against
the implication that he had contracted the disease from sex with another man.
Even from that point, he refers to a gay man as Tinkerbell. The implication is
that Ron is severely prejudiced against homosexuality, and his context being
that of rodeos in Texas makes this interior state very believable.
Yet without giving the viewer a sense of sufficient story
time having elapsed, Ron latterly chokes Tucker, one of his rodeo friends in a
grocery store for refusing to shake hands with Ron’s business partner, the
cross-dressing, AIDs infected Rayon, played by Jared Leto. Even for Ron to have
lost his strong prejudice is hard to fathom, as he could have worked with, and
even come to like Rayon without losing his distaste for homosexuality; for Ron
to violently force Tucker to shake Rayon’s hand is apt to strike the viewer as
sheer artifice on the part of the screenwriter and director. It is as though
Ron were a Janus-like fictive caricature rather than a character based on an
actual person.
Taken to an extreme, a character’s quick “about face” can
leave the viewer wondering where the antagonist went. Indeed, the distinction
between a protagonist and an antagonist can become confused, infecting even the
structural integrity of the narrative itself. In the 2014 film Godzilla, Godzilla loses all his monster
lore built up through preceding films to become—all of a sudden—the savoir of
San Francisco. What had been a fight between Godzilla and two other dinosaurs
is all of a sudden Godzilla protecting the city and its human inhabitants from
the radiation-eating male and female animals invented in this film-version. The
switch from antagonist to protagonist simply is not believable, and the story
itself suffers as a consequence.
Fortunately, remedies exist. Using story-time rather than short-circuiting can be part of the mix. Lincoln says in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, “time is a great thickener of
things.” A montage can give the viewer a sense not only of time passing, but of
a character undergoing maturating learning as, for instance, from sustained
suffering in the process. Signs of an interior change vital to the narrative
can begin in the montage, or otherwise patently as the story resumes. Staggered
thusly (like a recurring, subtle melody in the string section of an orchestra) and so only gradually anticipated by the viewer, when the change finally manifests full-blown as vital to the story, the realized “growth” or change is credible. This credibility can
actually contribute to the suspension of disbelief that is so vital to the
believability of the story and thus its constructed world and characters.
