When Sunrise at Campobello, Dore Schary’s play about the crippling of Franklin D. Roosevelt, opened on Broadway, Eleanor Roosevelt and two close friends were in the audience as his guests. It is a heroic double portrait in which Mrs. Roosevelt is unfailingly patient and FDR is barely permitted an unhappy thought, let alone a discouraging word. After the curtain fell, the president’s widow went backstage, where, gracious as always, she thanked the playwright and praised the whole cast, especially Ralph Bellamy, whose bravura impersonation of her husband had genuinely impressed her. But, as she and her friends rode home afterward in their taxi, she admitted that the play itself had had about as much to do with her and her family “as the man in the moon.”

Until very recently, most portrayals of historic personages on stage and screen have been more or less like those Mrs. Roosevelt found so disconcertingly unfamiliar: uniformly virtuous icons who, like Raymond Massey’s sepulchral Lincoln, or—as with George C. Scott’s Patton and even Ben Kingsley’s Gandhi—had their authentic flaws somehow transformed into lovable quirks through the actor’s alchemy.

Things have changed. As three interesting recent movies suggest, all of them now likely to be available for rent at your video store, at least some of today’s historical filmmakers prefer to focus on their subject’s flaws and not their strengths.

In Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994), the director Alan Rudolph manages to bring to surprisingly vivid life the circumscribed world of Dorothy Parker and her friends and fellow diners at the Algonquin Round Table. The characters in this screenplay are almost all well-known—or once well-known—literary personalities: Marc Connell, Edna Ferber, George S. Kaufman, Charles MacArthur, Harold Ross, Robert Sherwood, Alexander Woollcott, and more—and in less sure hands the whole film could have merely become an exercise in name-dropping and caricature. Instead, I had a sense when the cast seated itself and began to chatter that I was somehow listening in on the real thing.

To lunch daily with this egomaniacal crew, as Parker did, must have been something like being a permanent guest on a TV talk show, expected always to come up with a gag while remembering never to say anything too substantive for fear of slowing the frantic pace. As the film’s protagonist, Jennifer Jason Leigh gets to recite some of Parker’s sly, bleak verse and to toss off some of her best one-liners in a strange, slurred, world-weary manner that somehow seems just right: “A girl can get splinters sliding down a barrister” isn’t a bad line; neither is “one more drink and I’ll be under the host.” But the film also shows how inane most of what passed for repartee at the Algonquin really was: If someone happened to end a sentence with “a Jew,” someone else could be counted on to say Gesundheit .

Beneath the brittle laughter Parker is seen as