ON FILM Books vs. movies? Not really a battle

By Philip Martin (Contact)

LITTLE ROCK — I’ve been asked to give a talk about books and movies and the relationship between the two, a subject freightedwith potential for snobbery, especially given that they’ve asked this movie critic to speak at a library.

It’s clear books are a minority interest these days while movies - across one platform or another - are still our culture’s main method of talking to itself. It is very easy to decide that one is popular and dumb and that the other is elitist and pretentious.

It’s neither helpful nor true to make such generalizations- compare the best-seller list with the week’s box-office leaders and you might weep for your country. Bad books and bad movies predominate; the vulgar and the obvious outsell the fine and subtle. There are plenty of dull artists making lots of money by comforting or shocking people.

But a more interesting question might be about the relationship between good books and good movies, if such a relationship exists. It does not, although some filmmakers are able to make wonderful films that refer to wonderful books (such as Michael Winterbottom’s funny anarchic 2005 film A Cock and Bull Story, which purports to be a adaptation of Laurence Sterne’s “unfilmable” novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman). And some novelists - Haruki Murakami, for instance - write beautifully cinematic books.

Then there are movies like Norway’s 2006 Reprise, which had a brief theatrical run in Little Rock recently, or Mark Pellington’s oddly poetic Henry Poole Is Here, that manage to feel - through their selective details, textures and asides - novelistically rich.

It is not quite true that bad books make better movies than good books, although it is probably easier to make a movie from a mediocre novel than it is to do justice to great literature. There is too much stuff in the best books that cannot be easily distilled into (at most) 2 1 /2 hours of movie.

Take, for example, the recent film version of Brideshead Revisited. That much was left out is obvious - the 1981 British television series (which also aired on PBS) based on Evelyn Waugh’s novel consisted of 11 one-hour episodes. (It was so popular with U.S. viewers that it should probably be considered the definitive Brideshead - it was voted the seventh-favorite Masterpiece Theater series ever broadcast, even though it hadn’t aired on the series but as part of PBS’s Great Performances.)

Anyway, the director of 2008’s Brideshead Revisited, Julian Jarrold, is a television-trained British director who seems to specialize in literary adaptations (he has done TV movie versions of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales). He claims never to have seen the 1981 series and looked instead to Waugh’s semiautobiographical novel. And he manages to turn out a diverting if somewhat overheated version of the basic story, employing most of Waugh’s major characters and fairly representing what happens. You might even argue that it captures some of the tone of the novel - although the Charles Ryder at the end of the film feels more heroic than the same character at the end of the book. In the book, Ryder comes across as a self-loathing social climber; in the movie, he’s simply rueful.

Jarrold almost completely avoids what may have been the novel’s chief theme - Waugh’s argument for the Catholic notion of divine grace and reconciliation.

It’s a completely understandable and maybe even necessary choice - people don’t go to the movies to think about the nuances of Catholic theology - but the point is the movie version of Brideshead Revisited is so different from the book that it makes little sense to consider them anything but distant relatives. The film is derivative of the book but has its own merits. You might prefer one experience over the other but there’s no point comparing different species: A film is more like a painting than a book.

Books inspire movies - and the other way around - but neither form can genuinely be translated into the other withoutsignificant loss of energy and substance. A filmmaker, if he wants to make a good movie, must put something into his film that can’t be in the book - the way emotions play on the face of a skilled actor or a particular visual sensibility that connects with viewers on an inarticulate level.

The measure of whether a film made from a book is successful has nothing to do with how faithful it is to the story the book tells, or even its tone - lots of great movies depart from the novels that inspire them. Though Demi Moore was widely ridiculed for defending the liberties her 1995 movie The Scarlet Letter took with the Nathaniel Hawthorne classic by flippantly suggesting (probably correctly) that few people had read the original anyway, in truth no movie has a duty to stick to the script prescribed by authorial intent.

Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt takes only the title, the protagonist’s surname and a few ideas about getting older from the Louis Begley novel of the same title. While I’m not a great admirer of that movie - I think it’s Payne’s weakest work - the Begley novel, aside from being practically unfilmable, is a kind of intellectual literary exercise that requires the active engagement of an interested reader.

Books require more of us than movies, although both forms can reward our attention. (And sometimes paying too much attention detracts from the entertainment value of the experience. But entertainment is just one reason people read books and watch movies.)

So we should probably let go of the conceit that a movie based on a book is either better or worse than a book - some people would rather read, most would prefer to watch. But laziness has not yet destroyed the book, which remains a persistent artifact in even ourpost-literate age.

Reading offers real and unique pleasures - it allows us to make our own movies in our head, in collaboration with the author, who supplies the idea of the characters, the dialogue and the action. But a script is not a movie, and an unread novel is an unrealized one.

The real difference between books and movies are the screen on which they play - one is public, and can be as big as any wall, the other is private, as big as the imagination.

E-mail:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

MovieStyle, Pages 37, 42 on 08/22/2008