Bonnie Parker is one of those people who has transcended the reality of their actual existence to transform into an iconic figure that looms much larger in death than she ever could have in life. As a result, the portrait of Bonnie Parker put on film must attempt to match that expanded character. A gritty, realistic film about Bonnie Parker and her partner-in-crime, Clyde Barrow, could conceivably be a worthwhile project on its own, but in addition to comparisons to the icon, it must also stand up to the mythos of Arthur Penn's 1960s biopic "Bonnie and Clyde."
For this reason, Miley Cyrus is just plain wrong for the part. Cyrus has the kind of voice that one might imagine belonging to the real Bonnie Parker, but that register which is just an octave or two above James Earl Jones really doesn't seem to fit in with the mythical Bonnie Parker was delineated so masterfully on celluloid by Faye Dunaway. Interestingly enough, Dunaway also has a deeper than normal female voice, but the memory one has is of a more ethereal Bonnie than the facts suggest.
Faye Dunaway was a relative unknown who turned into a superstar with her performance in "Bonnie and Clyde." A lifetime later, Dunaway has proven herself a very fine if uneven actress. On the other hand, nothing on the resume of MIley Cyrus yet indicates that she is up to the part of Bonnie Parker, either as white trash bank robber or mythically iconic figure of 99-percenter trying to get out from the under the thumb of the 1% bank owners extending the lifeline of the Great Depression through their own blind greed.
The typical view of Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty as "Bonnie and Clyde" is of counterrevolutionary figures transported from the hardscrabble life of the 1930s into the hippie culture of the 1960s. What is more often than not overlooked is that once Bonnie and Clyde received the money they stole from banks, they embraced the capitalist ideology shared by the bankers rather than rejecting it and going for something more subversive.
The very idea of casting Miley Cyrus tends to indicate that the makers of this latest addition to the canon of films about the duo have just as little interest in subversion.
For more from Timothy Sexton, potential bank robber, check out:
The Gangster Film and the American Dream
Comedy, Ideology and Bank Robbery Movies
