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
