Today’s NY Times had a decent little article about films which superseded (or were superlative to) the book. I generally sidestep conversations about such matters–they get dull in an NPR tongue-clucking way (about the ostensible decline of the literate class) real fast–but: what are some good ones? Egregiously awful ones?
I just saw Enduring Love which is not a good one. Looks awfully fine, and has a neat creepy performance by Rhys Ifans, but the novel was one of those intellectual puzzles Ian McEwan is so good at, heavy on the abstractions, and the film opts instead for the grounded suspense/thriller aspects. Which, alas, drops the book’s vertiginous spin through evolutionary theory, ye olde battles of art and science, and dizzying questions about love — leaving us with a movie that seems telegraphed, as if whole chunks of background have been edited away. It moves, but it’s hard to follow. So, this is a bad adaptation, trying hard to be faithful but also film-viewer-friendly, and failing at both.
Garp is way better than
A vote for Kurosawa as the most astute and idiosyncratic adapter — his High and Low takes a pulp novel by Ed McBain (
John Huston also was great–recreating a style to fit each new narrative. Prizzi’s Honor, The Dead, stretching back to his stuff with Bogart…
My favorite Shakespearean adaptation is Strange Brew, Hamlet via Rollerball.
Jeff hates this subject. Go nuts, Jeff.
then there’s adaptations that pissed off the writers: “solaris” and “a clockwork orange” come to mind. i have not read “barry lyndon” so cannot comment on the degree to which kubrick changed things around. but his “lolita” would surely qualify as an adaptation which works as a complement.
Another one that pissed off the writer: “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Kesey refused to see it. Never did. Now he’s dead. And can’t see it.
Vonnegut has never been pleased with any of the adaptations of his books. “Slapstick (of Another Kind)” goes so far beyond the realm of “bad” that it emerges, on the other side if you will, as pure Object, standing before, over against, opposite us.
I like what Errol Morris did with Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time.”
“Passion of the Christ” didn’t thrill the aspostle John. A reporter from “Variety” overheard him call Gibson’s film “self-indulgent garbage.”
john said: Now he’s dead. And can’t see it.
Wait a minute – you don’t think God let’s us watch movies in heaven? Eternity is a long time to go without wathcing movies.
Vonnegut: I had realtively high hopes for Alan Rudolph’s “Breakfast of Champions” and I didn’t let bad reviews dissuade me. I do often hope that Bruce Willis will appear in another decent film before he dies. (And that Rudolph will direct one) Alas, that was not that one for either of them.
And I didn’t like Spike Lee’s Clockers much, but I liked it a LOT less than I would have if I hadn’t read the book. I liked the book a lot.
There are some books I can only dream would have good film versions made of them (but won’t): Vollmann’s The Royal Family, Denis Johnson’s Already Dead, … the letters of E.B. White… the Associated Press Style Book. …Jack Palance’s book of poems….
i actually liked rudolph’s “breakfast of champions”–i think it captured vonnegut about as well as any film could. wasn’t “mother night” filmed at about the same time as well?
sorderbergh’s “out of sight” is the best elmore leonard adaptation i’ve seen. “jackie brown” doesn’t feel like leonard but is a great film in its own right (perhaps my favorite tarantino). let’s not talk about “be cool” (one of many movies i watched on the flight from l.a to singapore).
Elmore Leonard offers up a great test case for adaptation. I agree with you about “Out of Sight” and “Jackie Brown,” although what I like about both is how they read Leonard through their respective directors’ favorite influences (New Wave cinema and “Point Blank” for Soderbergh; ’70s B-movie crime dramas for Tarantino). It is also illustrative to put Soderbergh’s film up against “Get Shorty,” as Scott Frank wrote both screenplays, yet tonally and stylistically the films are remarkably distinct.
John Frankenheimer did my second-favorite Leonard adaptation: 52-Pickup, with Roy Scheider and an OUTSTANDING John Glover and Clarence Williams III. It retains Leonard’s grittiness (or at least that darker pulpier edge he had in the books from the ’70s and ’80s).
I hated Rudolph’s “Breakfast,” even ‘though I like both Rudolph and Vonnegut. Arnab’s estimation about its capturing KV “about as well as any film could” is probably right–but that isn’t saying much. “Mother Night” is a bit too somber and respectful; Nolte’s good, Alan Arkin is better, but the film seems like an eighth-grader’s summary of the book’s themes and moral.
Atom Egoyan’s “Sweet Hereafter” and “Felicia’s Journey” are both excellent adaptations; I think I finally got Egoyan after watching these.
Harold Pinter and Paul Schrader adapted a creepy Ian McEwan novel to great effect: “The Company of Strangers”. Walken’s in it, and he’s chilling without ever being campy. It’s very good.
Robert Altman’s “The Dumb Waiter” is crap. The film should have ended as the play did–with Ben and Gus just staring at each other.
I agree with Mike about “52 Pickup.” It was the first Leonard novel I ever read, and the first Leonard adaptation I ever saw. Both terrific. I miss actors like Roy Scheider (Peter Boyle, etc.)
Apocalypse Now is one of the few models of effective adaptation; it revises its source material while maintaining its tone and spirit. its own flaws and excesses are new but somehow indebted to the flaws and excesses of Conrad’s novella. it suggests Heart of Darkness so strongly while indicating that a book is a book and a film is a film and neither has any real affinity for the other.
I love the sleaziness of “52 Pick-Up”….I suggest it on a double bill with Robert Aldrich’s Hustle (Burt Reynolds and Catharine Deneuve); afterward you will feel as if you’ve been dipped in some kind of gritty Wesson oil. I like to pretend that Catharine is helping me to rub it off….oops, perhaps I’ve said too much?
Obvious good adaptations would be The Godfather and M*A*S*H, both of which took pulp novels and found the core that captured a mood and made them almost sublime (as in Apocalypse Now, as Frisoli says above).
More controversially, I’d add the version of The Quiet American with Michael Caine as Fowler, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, before Daniel Day Lewis decided that making shoes is more fun than acting.
Finally, this is a cheat because I never read the book, but A Simple Plan was a wonderful film, both because the acting is so good (Bill Paxton coming off One False Move and Trespass, before he started doing crap), and because Sam Raimi was halfway between Evil Dead and Spiderman, and it shows with some lovely bits of horror at unexpected moments.
I read Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake this past week and then read that arnab’s fav film director, Mira Nair, is directing the adaptation (or is in post-production on the project). I must admit I had problems with the novel on a number of levels (anyone want to quiz me on that may do so) and cannot imagine what Nair will do with it. Anyone know more?
The third Harry Potter movie. Good.
Foxfire. (There’s nothing like a pouty Angelina Jolie to make other girls go weak in the knees.) They couldn’t afford the sets for the 50s, so they set the film in the 90s and well, feminism isn’t really new in the 90s. It was just so watered down. Oates apparently hasn’t really minded the adaptations. She wrote an article in the NYT defending Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk (the widely-anthoogized “Where are You Going, etc”). But then, I don’t think she’s that into ownership of her stories, even if she won’t let anyone edit them. Too many of her books (and Margaret Atwood’s) get made into TV mini-series.
Oh. Don’t get me started on The Handmaid’s Tale.
In anticipation of the opening of “The Constant Gardener” what are the best movie adaptations of John Le Carre novels? Setting aside those that were serialized on TV (“Tinker, Tailor” and “Smiley’s people”), my votes would be: “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” with a great, world-weary performance from Richard Burton, and “Tailor of Panama” with Pierce Brosnan and Geoffrey Rush playing against type. Runner up goes to “The Looking Glass War.”
Pity that “Honorable Schoolboy” was never made into a movie.
This is the point to ask what makes a spy movie work. But only Mike could do that question justice.
We should open up a new thread on spy movies! But I promise I’ll refrain from fussing about. Well…. fussing about too much. Excluding the BBC series–which are the only ones that really work on the whole, rather than in excellent parts–is unfair. But I’d second your nomination of Burton in Spy Who, and be a bit harsher about Tailor which seemed to start superbly before falling into bland thriller conventions. My favorite, though, is The Russia House, where Sean Connery gets to be the world-weary one, and the director Fred Schepisi gets the tone (steeped in irony) exactly right.
A side-note, tying this to Lovecraft. A novelist named Charles Stross wrote an alternate history where the forces arrayed behind WWII are steeped in Lovecraftian mythology; British Intelligence–and it is very much a spy novel–are the heroes. (In some ways this is like Hellboy, but that story seems more a thriller than a spy narrative.) And Stross, in an afterword, does this brilliant job comparing/unpacking the intersections of Lovecraft’s horrors and Le Carre-like cold-war fictions: the common focus on interpreting texts, decoding signs, people not being what they seem to be but actually manifestations of deeper structures, and (of course) the thrill and dangers of forbidden knowledge.
The Guardian organized a panel to select the 50 best movie adaptions of books. Here it is.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1756306,00.html
I had no idea ‘Kes’ was based on a book.
I would also agree about Burton in Spy….I often think of my activities now as “just another dirty operation.” unfortunately i don’t know other le carre adaptations that live up to this one. and I haven’t seen the BBC adaptations. the Len Deighton adaptations with Michael Caine are also good. I think any spy thriller should have a feeling of sweaty paranoia.
lovecraft and spy fiction sounds like a perfect combination. here i want to put in a plug for my upcoming novel tying lovecraft’s mythology to the academic world. every memo, every committee meeting, every discussion of a “rubric” is merely another means to unleash the Old Ones on the earth again. that Dean who seems so helpful in clarifying tenure requirements–another minion for the Lurker on the Threshold.