The 53rd Academy Awards (1981)
Nominations: 7
Wins: 1
Another genre that has become quite dominant at the Oscars in recent years is the musical biopic, as evidenced by the fact that even a wildly uneven one like Elvis was nominated for Best Picture this year. It’s a genre that for whatever reason continues to rake in both moviegoers and awards, despite the fact that Walk Hard quite pointedly lampooned all of the musical biopic’s various clichés in a way that probably should have made it obsolete. Obviously, this felt like a good year to finally see Coal Miner’s Daughter, since its subject Loretta Lynn passed away just a few months ago. However, it also feels appropriate to watch this movie in relation to Elvis, just because it takes such a different approach in telling a similar rags-to-riches story of a singer not always in control of their career.
That singer of course is the aforementioned Loretta Lynn (played by Sissy Spacek), who grew up in the shadow of the Kentucky coal mines that her father Ted (Levon Helm) worked in, coming home from work each evening covered in soot. As a teenager, Loretta meets a charismatic young man named Doolittle (Tommy Lee Jones) who comes back to Kentucky from his service in the army vowing to not spend his life working in those mines. He and Loretta quickly form a bond and Dooey becomes set on marrying Loretta, despite the fact that her dad is fairly against it. However, he eventually wins him over and the two of them end up having four kids while living a fairly typical working-class life, with Dooey eventually being forced to take up work in those coal mines.
While raising these kids, Loretta displays a knack for singing to the kids before bedtime while throughout the early parts of the film, she also has an affinity for the country singers she hears coming through the radio. However, the life of a singer feels about as far away from Loretta’s life as imaginable, until Dooey buys her a guitar one and she starts singing more in her free time. During her first public performance, Loretta’s talent becomes impossible to deny, so seeing her as his meal ticket, Dooey more or less becomes Loretta’s manager, having her sing all around the South before inevitably making it to the Grand Ole Opry. However, as Loretta’s fame grows, she comes under the supervision of different managers and Dooey fades into the background of her professional life. This leads him to become philandering and occasionally abusive, and yet regardless, Loretta and Dooey continue to soldier on as husband and wife despite their ups and downs.
One reason why Coal Miner’s Daughter doesn’t feel encumbered with your typical music biopic tropes is because the biography it’s based on doesn’t fit all that neatly into your typical movie plot, seeing as Loretta and Doolittle Lynn were married for 48 years despite their tumultuous relationship. In your typical Hollywood biopic, Loretta would leave her incredibly imperfect husband after recognizing her true potential both in her life and career. However, Coal Miner’s Daughter is instead tasked with depicting a more complicated and knotty relationship, albeit one that led to a lot of material for Loretta Lynn’s songs about the highs and lows of married life.
Another reason why this film feels so disconnected from your typical music biopic is that it’s much more interested in the human beings at the heart of this story than it is the music. We don’t really see Sissy Spacek sing as Loretta until nearly halfway into the movie, as much of the film is really just a story about being thrown into adulthood and the family life at a young age, all the while knowing that there’s something better out there. It’s the kind of biopic that if made today would probably leave a lot of fans dissatisfied with the lack of music, but I found it refreshing as a movie from that era about oddball characters on the fringes of American society, akin to something like Five Easy Pieces or Melvin and Howard.
All that said, one thing the movie has to accomplish that all biopics about famous people must is show their transformation from mere normal citizen to superstar. It’s an especially hard thing to pull off when from what the movie tells us, Loretta Lynn led a fairly submissive early life, with most of her decisions being made by her strong-willed husband. Yet, Loretta Lynn’s public persona has always been that of a feisty no-nonsense singer who’ll kick your ass if you try to take her man, which Dooey seemed obliged to let plenty of women attempt to do. However, Sissy Spacek gives a completely believable performance, showing both why the real-life Loretta has always come off as fairly reserved in interviews, yet also has this strong-willed tenacity lurking beneath that housewife politeness. The movie makes it clear that her ability as a singer eventually gave her this confidence, and the fact that Spacek sings all of the songs in the movie makes it more than apparent why she won the film’s lone Oscar.
As I mentioned earlier, despite the fact that Doolittle Lynn was kind of a turd, the real-life Loretta never broke up with him, so the movie can’t just make him a straight-up villain. This makes for a more nuanced character, who Tommy Lee Jones plays with plenty of fire and brashness, but can also make pathetic enough that even if the character isn’t always likable, he is occasionally sympathetic. It is honestly a little beguiling that Jones wasn’t nominated for an Oscar for this movie, since it could be categorized as either a lead or supporting performance, and the tension he creates is the crux of what makes this a compelling story.
One other thing I feel like I have to comment on is the direction of Michael Apted, who oversaw the Up series, one of my very favorite pieces of documentary filmmaking. Though Apted’s feature film career ended up being pretty weird (directing everything from Thunderheart to The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of Dawn Treader), here you can definitely see the humanist eye that Apted developed while making the Up series. He’s clearly much more interested in these people and their working-class roots than he is in Loretta Lynn’s music, and yet because her music was so autobiographical, it still ends up becoming about her music, even if it’s not playing snippets of songs every two minutes or giving her an opportunity that “comes once in a lifetime” to sing “that one song that would sum you up”.