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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
If taking the time and care to adapt a movie into a script is such torture, then why have so many people pulled it off so well just in the past year, with barely a complaint? Strangely enough, one of the recent movies that made me angriest about "Adaptation" was one I didn't even like: Stephen Daldry's "The Hours" is an adaptation of Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that connects the lives of two women (one in the present day and one in the 1950s) with that of Virginia Woolf, and also with one of her best-loved books, "Mrs. Dalloway." Cunningham's novel is a complex interlacing of motifs, structurally impressive but thematically dopey: It's all about women finding themselves, as Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway did, in the smallest, most fractional moments of their lives.
Many people have been struck by the novel's depth and beauty, but I couldn't help seeing it as a hyperintellectualized and artsified version of those old "Calgon, take me away!" ads -- a well-intentioned, sensitive scrutiny of how hard women's lives are, and what dangerously misunderstood creatures they can be, but one that fixates on the molecules of pain and suffering and joy that constitute those lives instead of actually developing characters.
But say what you want about it: In movie terms, "The Hours" would seem to be a wholly unadaptable book. Daldry's film version -- the script is by David Hare -- takes itself very seriously, to the point that Daldry loads every moment with equal weight. Since everything is weighed equally, "The Hours" has no real rhythm -- it's loaded with more stones than poor Virginia's pockets when she wades into that river at the end of her life. The camera will shift from an actress's face to the sight of an egg being cracked against a bowl, accompanied by a sharp smacking sound. Over and over again, a camera movement or a sound will demand our attention: We are commanded to note the importance of that breaking egg! In "The Hours," eggs are broken in the late teens, the early '50s, and the year 2000 -- a symbol of the fragility of women's lives dashed against the constraints of society, I suppose.
"The Hours" has its problems as a piece of filmmaking. But it's impossible to ignore the obvious care Daldry and Hare took in shaping this most unruly book into a picture whose seemingly wayward narratives interlock into a seamless story. (In fact, Daldry and Hare may have improved on the structure of Cunningham's book; a fellow critic who didn't much care for the movie nonetheless admitted that its careful construction made him more critical of the novel.)
An even more stunning example of translating a strange and subtle book to film is Lynne Ramsay's soon-to-be-released movie version of Scottish novelist Alan Warner's "Morvern Callar." In "Morvern Callar," a young Scottish woman (played by the astonishing Samantha Morton) deals with her boyfriend's suicide by not dealing with it. Morton goes about her business -- going to her dull job at the supermarket, going out to dance clubs with her best friend -- as if her boyfriend's lifeless body weren't cluttering up her flat.
Everything Morvern feels is suggested, not spelled out. Warner's book is bizarre and wonderful; there's a vaguely hopeful fierceness to it, but mostly it's a hymn to the strange process of riding out grief and melancholy. Ramsay's movie (she and Liana Dognini adapted the book) is equally elliptical and suggestive -- it doesn't so much tell a story as lay out the shifting colors of mood beneath that story. It's one of the most beautiful examples of a novel turned into film I've seen in years.
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The only people who really know what it's like to adapt a book into a movie are the people who have done it. But I imagine it takes a measure of self-effacement: Your mission is to use your instincts and your intellect to decide what should stay, what should go and how it all should be reshaped and dramatized, but you must all the while put yourself in the service of the work at hand. Done right, it's a peculiar sort of master craftsmanship: You're using someone else's raw materials to create something that is mostly them, but will of course also be a little bit you.
There are plenty of people who disliked Neil LaBute's version of A.S. Byatt's "Possession," claiming (among other things) that it destroyed the essence of the book by making one of its lead characters American instead of English, and that it sliced out major chunks of Byatt's artistry -- for one thing, the heaps of poetry. The poetry in Byatt's novel is pitch-perfect, the ultimate mimicry of Victorian-era verse. It's astonishingly clever at first, but before long comes off as mostly a stunt.
Of course, including poetry in movies is extremely difficult, since it usually demands that a filmmaker use the dreaded voice-over. But even beyond that, LaBute's "Possession" represents a range of choices on the filmmaker's part (he co-adapted the book, along with David Henry Hwang and Laura Jones), some of them personal and some of them purely cinematic. Roland Michell, the character who was changed from English to American for the movie (played by Aaron Eckhart), is a better character for the movie because of it.
