Apted: Coal Miner's Daughter (1980)

Country music tends to be sceptical of neat epiphanies or total transcendence, which makes crafting a truly country biopic a bit of a challenge, since most musical biopics revolve around a series of epiphanies – the moment when the singer recognises their own talent, the moment when their peers recognise their talent and, finally, the moment when the world at large recognises their talent. Released in 1980, Coal Miner’s Daughter tells the now-mythical story of Loretta Lynn’s rise to fame yet manages to avoid its own mythology by keeping fairly clear of any of those epiphanies, resulting in a singularly graceful, gracious and generous biopic – fresh and frank in its unaffected immediacy as one of the songs that made Loretta so beloved among country fans. Opening with Loretta’s (Sissy Spacey) childhood in Van Lear, we move through her marriage to “Mooney” Lynn (Tommy Lee Jones) at the age of thirteen, and then onto her life as a wife and mother before her musical career kicked off and propelled her to Nashville and the Grand Ole Opry, where she formed a friendship with Patsy Cline (Beverly D’Angelo), only to sink into a creeping depression and exhaustion that she nevertheless manages to shrug off by the end of the film as well. In music biopics, epiphanies are often forged and framed in the midst of just these hardships, so it’s telling that the film never dwells on any moment in Loretta’s life as a pretext for tragedy, but instead gathers her many challenges into the country voice that she both inherited and made so indubitably her own – resilient, pragmatic, accessible and above all suffused with what Dolly Parton called “country dumb,” a kind of studied oblivion to how to milk her material for the pathos it seems to demand. Too artless to feel prodigious or precocious, her music comes from the heart in ways that preclude the kind of rags-to-riches or talent-will-triumph lesson that might be expected, with some of her most memorable and magical lyrics simply emerging gradually and organically out of her day-to-day routines – listening to the radio, singing lullabies to her babies, trying desperately to keep her children entertained. At times, it almost has a documentary kind of feel, especially in the way it transitions from year to year – in that sense, the choice of Apted is perfect – suffused with the undisguised plainness of a telemovie. At the same time, that naturalism opens up at just the right moment as well, as Loretta and Mooney embark upon a kind of radio road trip to start off her career – in some ways the most joyous and picaresque part of the entire film - travelling cross-country from station to station as they promote her first record, only to end up at the Grand Ole Opry itself. From thereon the film, like Loretta’s singing, feels slightly more “produced,” but it’s production of a careful, classical kind, as Apted sketches out a new traditionalist Nashville that feels like a riposte to Robert Altman’s postmodern driftscape, anchored in neon vistas, proscenium framing and swooping crane shots that reiterate, time and again, the cavernous, curvaceous co-ordinates of the Opry, which is translated from a radio to cinema venue in quite a remarkable way. Within that context, Loretta’s friendship with Patsy inevitably feels like something of a fantasy, but, then again, it never stops being something of a fantasy to Loretta either, like most of her career really – for all her rise to stardom, she always feels more attuned to the audience than to her fellow celebrities, which is what made her so popular with the country groupies that provide some periodic comic relief throughout the narrative. All in all, then, it’s one of Spacek’s best roles – her mercurial ability to appear about any age prevents her ever settling into either the role of ingenue or disingenue, capturing a celebrity who, by all accounts, was peculiarly and poetically unseduced by her celebrity.