Show and tell

Moviegoers and readers ought to learn to love the book and the film.

By Charles Taylor

Apr 24, 2001 | In a midtown Manhattan bookstore hangs a T-shirt that sums up the fractious relationship between literature and movies. The T-shirt shows a movie clapper board bearing the legend "The Book Was Better." While this is not a piece of apparel likely to be worn by anyone who has ever attempted to read "The Last of the Mohicans" ("There have been daring people in the world who claimed that [James Fenimore] Cooper could write English," said Mark Twain, "but they are all dead now"), it does speak for an awful lot of people who cling to the belief that movies can never equal the subtleties and nuances of literature.

A steady eye on the Arts and Leisure section of the Sunday New York Times will tell you that. After death and taxes, the third certainty of life is that the release of a movie adaptation of a classic novel will be the occasion for some littérateur to compare the two forms and find movies wanting. Into this club of the blinkered distinguished whose members include Cynthia Ozick (whose essay on Jane Campion's film of Henry James' "The Portrait of a Lady" was republished in her "Quarrel & Quandary") recently stepped novelist and critic David Gates weighing in on behalf of Edith Wharton and against Terence Davies' film of "The House of Mirth." "Respectful and intelligent" Gates calls the film, which are the sort of adjectives you employ when you've had a lousy time but feel duty-bound to recognize that there's some talent involved.

If we were back in the old movie days when a credit for a film of "Romeo and Juliet" read "by William Shakespeare, additional dialogue by Sam Taylor," there might be some real reason to distrust even the thought of literature being made into movies. Hints of the bad old days still crop up. The Demi Moore remake of "The Scarlet Letter" provided a happy ending just as the Greta Garbo version of "Anna Karenina" had (and may God forgive me for mentioning those two women in the same sentence). But especially in the last 15 years -- after Philip Kaufman's movie of Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"; Paul Mazursky's film of Isaac Bashevis Singer's "Enemies, a Love Story"; Jack Clayton's film of Brian Moore's "The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne"; Stephen Frears' version of Choderlos de Laclos "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" (helpfully retitled "Dangerous Liaisons" for those who might have mistakenly thought they were seeing a film about lesbian rivals); Gillian Armstrong's film of Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women"; the adaptations of Frances Hodgson Burnett's "The Secret Garden" and "A Little Princess" by, respectively, Agniezska Holland and Alfonso Cuaron; Cuaron's film of Dickens' "Great Expectations"; the films of Russell Banks' "The Sweet Hereafter" and "Affliction" made by Atom Egoyan and Paul Schrader; Lasse Halström's film of John Irving's "The Cider House Rules"; and the greatest of all movie adaptations, John Huston's magnificent final bow with his film of James Joyce's "The Dead" -- you'd think that the question of whether movies can successfully adapt literature would be settled. Still, aggrieved fiction writers bleat on, goats against the herd.

Of course, there are exceptions to any generalization. Novelists James Agee and Graham Greene are among the best film critics who ever practiced the craft (I have preferred Greene's criticism to his novels). The work collected in Dwight MacDonald's classic "On Movies" is probably the liveliest film writing ever done by a movie critic with no instinctive feel for movies (as opposed to the refinements of that mandarin drone Philip Lopate, which is the deadest). Norman Mailer has butted heads with the movies over the years resulting in work that's been brilliant, and usually off the mark.

The literary critic Geoffrey O'Brien has shown much better aim. His "The Phantom Empire" is an original and haunting piece of film criticism. There were a slew of vivid portraits in the recent collection "O.K. You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors." And there are plenty of novelists whose work is infused with the spirit and influence of the movies. Off the top of my head, Richard Price, Terry Southern with his demonic screwball slapstick, Jonathan Lethem with his feel for the iconography of popular myth, the Cuban novelist G. Cabrera Infante, even James Joyce who at one point thought Busby Berkeley and Eisenstein should collaborate on the film of "Ulysses." But too many literary figures still treat movies like the poor country cousin with patches on his clothes.

Some of the reasons are easy to guess: jealousy over the fact that movies reach an audience that books simply don't. (Compare the hundreds of thousands who are likely to read a bestseller with the millions who will see the movie based on that book to grasp the disparity.) And then there are the scores of books that have been butchered by movies, the scores of writers chewed up and spit out by Hollywood. Given that history, an animosity between writers and movies is understandable.

But the real reason so many writers don't get movies is that, in their heart of hearts, they believe that only words are capable of conveying nuance, distinction, sensibility, thought. Listen to the phony conflict that Cynthia Ozick sets up in her essay "Cinematic James": "A novel is, first of all, made out of language; it is language that determines whether a novel's storytelling trajectory will land it in the kindgom of art or in the rundown neighborhood of the hackneyed." No argument so far. Unfortunately, she goes on, "A movie, by contrast, despite its all-encompassing arsenal of skills, probing angles, mood-inducing music, and miraculous technologies, is still a picture show [emphasis mine]." Ozick's choice of words gives her away. A novel is "made," in other words, the product of someone's choices. A movie, on the other hand, merely "shows."

You get the same thing in David Gates' article on "The House of Mirth." "These two versions of 'The House of Mirth' -- or, I should say, the real 'House of Mirth' and its cinematic representation -- suggest to me that fiction, by its very nature, can do a better job of storytelling than film, which in its purest form is story-showing" [emphasis his]. That a screenwriter, director, cinematographer, editor choose how to show us those pictures simply doesn't enter into either Ozick's or Gates' thinking.

Like every word a writer puts on a page, every shot in a movie is, for better or worse, a choice. The screenwriter chooses what to show us, the director how to frame what is shown, the cinematographer and lighting director how to light what is shown, the editor how long to show us this shot and in what relation to the images that surround it. Pictures do not materialize in front of a camera to be recorded any more than words magically appear on white paper or a computer screen. "Something," Gates concludes, "must explain why we put down Wharton's novel uplifted and come out of Mr. Davies's film just ever so slightly bummed." Sure. Edith Wharton is a greater talent than Terence Davies; her sensibility is tragic, his is depressive. But Gates can only conclude that, for him at least, it's the inferiority of the form itself. Ozick hastens to add a footnote disclaimer "Who today would dispute that movies are an art form?" Her, for one. I'll trust her declarative statement: Movies are still a picture show. But aren't novels word shows, dependent on the strengths of the showmen?

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