Good Reads Often Lost in Translation to the Screen

Written on the Wind
by Thomas Delapa

It’s not a novel conclusion that great books commonly make for bad films, and that middling—or downright bad—books are more readily re-booted into good movies. 

The cinema is papered with best-sellers transformed into box-office boondoggles. For every Lord of the Rings or Gone with the Wind, there are a dozen blustery duds, whether Bonfire of the Vanities, Beloved, Breakfast of Champions, The Shipping News, the Robert Redford Great Gatsby or the Demi Moore Scarlet Letter, to name only a few. And who can forget (or remember) last year’s abysmal John Carter, an Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation that bled red ink by the buckets for Disney.

The Godfather, arguably the greatest studio picture of the modern age, was sired not by a literary classic but a mass-market Mafia potboiler. While Steven Spielberg’s watershed Jaws may have taken a bite out of  Moby Dick for inspiration, the actual pages came from the pen of Peter Benchley, not Herman Melville. Ditto, Billy Wilder’s archetypal 1944 film noir Double Indemnity paid off handsomely from the lurid prose of James M. Cain.

Hefty, reputable books are weighed down with baggage, whether based on character complexity, narrative density or unique technique. When a book is underlined as “unfilmable” in Hollywood, it usually means the end of the story for would-be adapters. Complex narration, multiple story lines or anything remotely stream-of-consciousness are a slippery slope on the screen. That means most anything by James Joyce, William Faulkner or their modernist followers. By contrast, 19th-century Jane Austen and Charles Dickens have long been go-to film favorites, both for their linear plots and singular heroes and heroines. In 2002’s wacky Adaptation, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman poked fun at the Hollywood treatment, turning Susan Orlean’s nonfiction The Orchid Thief  into a satirical "meta"-movie about the thorny problems of transplanting an acclaimed book to the screen.

Yet the bold-faced question marks that always surround highbrow novels didn’t cause 2012 filmmakers to holster their highlighters. Three major fall releases—Cloud Atlas, Life of Pi and Anna Karenina—were mapped out first on the page; none should make audiences want to pass up their library privileges.

Based on David Mitchell’s 2004 novel, Cloud Atlas is the Wachowski siblings’ (Andy and Lana, formerly Larry) lofty, fog-bound attempt to tell six intersecting stories in six time periods spanning from the 19th-century past to the post-apocalyptic (aren’t they all?) future. Despite all the Wachowskis’ Hollywood cred earned from The Matrix blockbusters, the big studios wisely passed on the project, sending the siblings and co-director Tom Tykwer globe-trotting to Germany for a reported $100 million in financing. The modern Greece of fall films, Atlas lost most audiences in its dizzying storytelling, whipsawing between far-flung ages and places and likely giving its cast, including Tom Hanks (in, yes, six roles), a historic case of motion sickness. Had the filmmakers read up first on D.W. Griffith’s legendary 1916 folly Intolerance—which tried to intertwine four different historical sagas—they might have predicted Cloud’s soggy forecast.

Oscar-winning director Ang Lee had brighter results with Life of Pi, even if his cinematic equation doesn’t add up to the strengths of Yann Martel’s 2001 prize-winning adventure tale: It’s a Kiplingesque survival story at sea, which might seem unsinkable on paper, at least in the wake of Titanic. Much of the film takes place aboard a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean, where a shipwrecked East Indian boy (Suraj Sharma), nicknamed Pi, must fend off and outsmart a ferocious feline stowaway, namely a Bengal tiger. Shot in 3-D, Pi is a yeasty concoction of realism, fantasy and rich visuals, but the drama drifts into the shallow end. Lee and screenwriter David Magee’s treatment founders in stretches, primarily because the story isn’t firmly anchored in any buoyant dialogue to speak of. 

Does anyone remember Robert Shaw’s gripping interlude in Jaws re-telling the USS Indianapolis tragedy? And at least Alfred Hitchcock in Lifeboat gave his World War II audiences a crew of chatty malcontents and a Nazi; even director Robert Zemeckis gave Tom Hanks' Robinson Crusoe-like Cast Away a volleyball to bounce lines off. But the best Lee can muster is the sight of the tiger’s hungry, hungry stare as the beast threatens to take a piece out of Pi. With scant narration, the movie lists back and forth to an adult Pi (Irrfan Khan) mundanely relating his yarn to a journalist. In 3-D, the mostly digitized cat may fool younger audiences, but in standard projection he looks as scary-real as Tony the Tiger.

Crewing again with his lithe Atonement and Pride and Prejudice star Keira Knightley, British director Joe Wright reaches higher on the literary shelf in Anna Karenina, which has been film and TV fodder countless times, including in 1935 with Greta Garbo as the doomed Russian aristocrat. In search of a fresh take, Wright and famed screenwriter/playwright Tom Stoppard boldly turn Leo Tolstoy’s 900-plus page tome into a stylized, modernist musical of sorts—but, um, without any songs. Nearly all of it takes place on and around a visible stage, with the actors weirdly maneuvering through sets and rustic backstage machinery: i.e., Brecht does Tolstoy. The idea, I guess, is that Wright and Stoppard want to shine a spotlight on social role and performance in rigid 19th-century Russia. (Plus it saved the production a ton of money not to have to shoot on authentic sets or location.) 

But what might have worked on an actual stage seems doubly artificial and jarring on film, and we search in vain for a sense of a convincing time or place that Anna, her bourgeois husband (Jude Law) and her vain lover (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) inhabit. As striking as Knightley is with those supermodel looks, she always has come across as a resolutely contemporary woman, with ungirdled body language, and seems no more suited to play the pathetic adulterous victim than Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In the end, despite the jeers or cheers, the movies will always check out the good, great and near-great books for source material. In recent weeks, U.S. theaters have unwrapped at least three more adapted classics, including the Beat bible On the Road, the musical Les Miserables and director Peter Jackson’s premier part to his super-sized Hobbit trilogy, with Bilbo, Gandalf, Gollum redux, lifted from the pages of J.R.R. Tolkien. In Hollywood and beyond, popular novels are still precious ore, if not always worth their weight in box-office gold.

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12/27/12

Film Review | Hanna

Run Hanna Run

by Thomas Delapa


Once upon a time in an icy northern land, there was a little girl named Hanna, endowed with magical superhuman powers. Though she loved her father, Hanna couldn’t wait to grow up ... and start kicking ass.

A fairly appalling modern fairy tale, Hanna begins with the Brothers Grimm and ends in a grim, grungy post-humanism. Take a mishmash of Run Lola Run, The Terminator and Spy Kids, and upload with fashionable Y2K brutality, and—hocus-pocus—you’ll have director Joe Wright’s bastard Frankenstein creation.

Helen Reddy has nothing on Hanna (Saoirse Ronan), an ethereal 16-year-old whose wide-eyed robotic demeanor hides a hair-trigger urge to kill. When we first find her in the Finland tundra, she’s slaying a deer with bow and arrow. Yes, kimo sabe, her dad (Eric Bana) has trained her well. Her mission, which she has no trouble accepting, is to track down and knock off Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett), a nasty CIA operative with a Southern drawl and a fetish for chic shoes.

Even if Wiegler is a wicked witch of the West, this is no Cinderella story. But it’s not a stretch to see Hanna as a blond Red Riding Hood, kicking and shooting her away through Europe and Morocco, while eluding a pack of German nihilists. This all might have been fun had Wright (Atonement) and his screenwriters dodged a terminally hip violence that recycles the pulpy premise into flashy trash.

You can imagine Hanna as the virginal Aryan flip-side to the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Himmler himself couldn’t dream up a more uber-perfect Hitler youth than Ronan’s Hanna, whose fanatical devotion to her father(land) results in a trail of broken limbs and dead bodies. When she’s not busting heads, Hanna tags along with a cheeky Australian girl (Jessica Barden) and her family.

As wispy as Hanna’s tousled hair, Wright’s back story comes in fits and starts, and only serves to prime the pump in the high-octane, techno-fueled action. Despite a handful of fanciful locations—like an outdoor Berlin museum of decrepit dinosaurs—Wright’s sense of action doesn’t evolve much beyond his prehistoric slo-mo fight scenes.

In an archly stylized movie that coldly combines the unreal with the ludicrous, Wright does what heretofore seemed an impossible mission: He coaxes a crummy performance out of Blanchett, one of the screen’s best actresses. The only thing that stands out in Blanchett’s flat, walk-on villainy is her nice set of legs.


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4/12/11

Film Review | The Soloist

Minor Key

by Thomas Delapa

Among other variations on a theme, The Soloist plays a mournful ode for the American newspaper in the post-print era. A few years ago, Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez plucked a violin-playing, schizophrenic homeless man off the streets and turned him into a local celebrity of sorts. But don’t stop the presses for director Joe Wright’s discordant adaptation, which hits few high notes.

In his first film since the Oscar-nominated Atonement, Wright struggles to find the proper tone to translate Lopez’s front-page columns that first discovered Nathaniel Ayers back in 2005. As everyman-journalist Lopez, Robert Downey Jr. reprises his dithering, semi-manic performance mode that’s become as familiar as Beethoven’s Fifth.

In Susannah Grant’s screenplay, the solitary, divorced Lopez is nearly as much of a “soloist” as his pathetic discovery, played by Oscar winner Jamie Foxx, whom Lopez finds accompanied by a derelict shopping cart beneath a downtown statue of Ludwig van. Once a Juilliard student, Ayers now only plays for pigeons, his dark refrain of schizophrenia soothed only by his transporting passion for music.

What might have been a dramatic duet between the two leads is instead conducted as alternating asides, led by Ayers’ flights of rambling paranoia. During Foxx’s Rain Man-style riffs, Downey can only take five and wait--probably tapping his foot in dismay out of camera range.

Wright strikes a better chord during the claustrophobically subjective flashbacks to Ayers’ brighter past, first as child prodigy on bass in Cleveland and then as the clouds gather while a student at New York City’s prestigious Juilliard School in the 1970s. As Ayers grows up poor (seemingly without friends except for his mother and sister), a babel of threatening voices in his head grow stronger, dragging him to an abyss of mental illness. While Ayers plays his instrument amid the impersonal, car-created cacophony of L.A., you can’t escape feeling that his music isn’t just a refuge, but the only sane response to an unbalanced city.

The other melody at work in The Soloist is equally somber, and that’s Wright’s Dantean picture of the city's skid row. Perched on the edge of downtown, it’s a hellacious landscape of the homeless, mad, huddled and drug-addled, mostly black, where the American Dream has gone to curl up and die.
As living proof of the power of the press, Lopez’s columns become a lightning rod, exposing a civic disgrace and causing the city to allocate millions of dollar in funds into the blight. Loyal readers of Lopez also respond to his human-interest story, one donating a vintage cello for Nathaniel’s use.

As oppressively gritty as the movie is, Wright is saddled with a crusading, committed Hollywood-accented hero with ink coursing through his veins. Composed in bold type, Downey’s Lopez is as idealistic and passionate as any Frank Capra crusader from back in the days when newspapers really did have all the news that was fit to print. The tinny--and fictitious--role of Lopez’s editor and ex-wife (Catherine Keener) should have been blue-penciled before production started.

Despite Wright’s grand, near-operatic ambitions, the soaring interludes are rare. After all Lopez’s noble efforts to help Ayers, there’s more than a little counterpoint telling him (and us) that maybe people like Nathaniel are largely beyond therapy. That’s not the five-star finale that Hollywood might want, even if it does resound with the truth.

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