I was excited to see a biopic of (one of) the father(s) of motion pictures, Eadweard Muybridge. A perusal of my other IMDb reviews will demonstrate my interest in the history of the invention of movies. I've already written about the significance of Muybridge's chronophotographic work and projected motion-picture exhibitions to film history on the IMDb pages for "Sallie Gardner at a Gallop" (1878) and for a few documentaries about the man and his work. That's surely part of the reason why I was disappointed by this movie, "Eadweard." As with so many biopics, "Eadweard" has its share of historical inaccuracies, but I can overlook such errors to an extent if they're in the service of making a good or, at least, entertaining movie. Other movies about figures in the early history of cinema have been mostly fiction, but have also been entertaining and, perhaps, have even got at something of the essence of the magic of movies. Two that come to mind that succeed in this way are "Hugo" (2011), about early cine-magician Georges Méliès, and "The Magic Box" (1951), which makes an erroneous claim for William Friese-Greene as the primary inventor of cinema. Both feature some terrific scenes of filmmaking and film exhibition; moreover, those parts in "Hugo," at least, also benefit from actually being relatively historically faithful.
So, it could be overlooked that in "Eadweard" a scene shows him projecting photographic motion pictures with his Zoopraxiscope, while in reality, this wasn't the case. Due to a flaw in his projection system, which distorted the images on his discs, Muybridge, instead, projected drawn animations based on his photographs. That way, the images could be drawn in an elongated form that when projected with the Zoopraxiscope distorted them in a way that made them appear in a more realistic form. To the filmmakers' credit, while they screw up this scene at the 1893 World's Fair, they get an earlier scene right when Eadweard projects for his wife a drawn animation of an elephant walking. Also, never mind that the Kinetoscope wasn't at the 1893 World's Fair. Never mind that while the movie portrays Muybridge's exhibition at the Fair as a public failure, he, in fact, was successful enough with his Zoopraxiscope exhibitions to tour back-and-forth across the Atlantic for years with such shows. And, never mind that Muybridge killed his wife's lover, was acquitted for justifiable homicide, and that his wife died years before and a continent away (in the 1870s in California) from when and where he did his locomotion studies at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1880s, which is the time and place that the majority of this movie happens.
I get why they messed up the timeline. They wanted the love triangle, adultery, jealousy and murder parts, but they wanted the nude girls of the Pennsylvania studies in the movie, too. It's all titillating stuff which is why it's especially disappointing and surprising that "Eadweard" is boring. I think the reasons for this failure are partly stylistic and partly because of the bad choices they made in how to depict the history--much of which might've been fixed while simultaneously being more historically faithful.
Stylistically, the editing is showy, the score is overblown and there are a bunch of jump cuts and repetitive, ruminating shots that seem to be imitations of "The Tree of Life" (2011). Instead of philosophical musings regarding God and life as in that movie, however, "Eadweard" only offers for its audience's consideration the jealousies of Muybridge's personal life and the pseudoscience of his work. And, I mean pseudoscience--because as much as Muybridge may've argued or flattered otherwise to himself and others, there was little of hard scientific value to his chronophotography, but there was tremendous artistic and cultural value. Another photographer and inventor of motion pictures, Étienne-Jules Marey, was a scientist; Muybridge was not. Muybridge was an artist and a showman. Inexplicably, the filmmakers here went all-in with the pseudoscience, treating it as real science, and missed the golden opportunity to make a movie about art and showmanship, which are subjects more naturally and better transmitted cinematically anyways. The artist Thomas Eakins, who benefited from Muybridge's work, is in the movie, but he's wasted as a pervy caricature for the wife's modeling and the nudity controversy subplots.
There are also quite a few flashbacks, which they could've, instead, used to avoid messing up the timeline. Then, they wouldn't have had to have bothered with making up the nonsense subplot concerning Flora, Eadweard's wife, wanting desperately to be a model for her husband's studies--because, remember, she was dead already. And, they could've done better service to Muybridge's earlier chronophotography for kazillionaire Leland Stanford, rather than reducing that part of his life to the apocryphal story of settling a bet for Stanford, which, by the way, the movie doesn't even tell right. I doubt the casual viewer will get that brief reference, and those who will get it, like me, are just ticked off by it because it's inaccurate, and they don't even do the story justice. Most importantly, the flashbacks could've provided character motivation for Muybridge as a man who devoted himself entirely to his work in the present because his personal life turned into such a mess in the past. Thus, there'd also be a starker contrast between personal failure and professional success, instead of the doubled failure that the movie actually ends with by suggesting, again inaccurately, that Muybridge's "science" was stolen and made a mockery of by Thomas Edison for his peepshow box, the Kinetoscope.
On the plus side, Michael Eklund looks the part of Muybridge.
