“Atonement” was one of my favorite books of the last five years, so I was annoyed that there was going to be a movie. But of course I went to see it. Glumly. I don’t feel that need to see everything I like in print compressed for the screen.
Sometimes the transition is brilliant; “Lolita” the book and “Lolita” the movie are like two freestanding works of art. James Mason is a better Humbert Humbert than I imagined on my own when I read the book, and Shelley Winters just IS Charlotte Haze. The movie wasn’t a road trip like the book was, but since Nabokov wrote the screenplay, it had its own credibility.
“Atonement” is a good movie. The first half is beautiful, the casting is pretty perfect. But here’s why I suffer when I watch movies made from books that I like. One of the great sentences in the first chapter of the book was about the villainous little girl’s room: “a shrine to her controlling demon.” And, “the model farm consisted of the usual animals, but all facing one way, toward their owner, as if about to burst into song.” In the movie’s opening scene, the camera surveys animal figures on a rug on its way to finding the little girl typing. Does that really tell someone who hasn’t read the book that this little girl is self-absorbed and egotistical?
The movie won best drama at the Golden Globe awards and has seven Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture. And the author is a fan. AP last week quoted Ian McEwan saying the actress Saoirse Ronan’s portrayal of Briony Tallis gave you “the sense of her mind just turning.” He did also say that he thinks film is inferior to books at portraying human consciousness.
I didn’t read “No Country for Old Men.” Any Cormac McCarthy fans have thoughts on that movie?
Books on Film
Responses to “If Ian McEwan’s happy, why shouldn’t we be?”
February 18th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
I’m always a little worried when my favorite books are made into film, too, and there were a lot of them this year — Love in the Time of Cholera and The Kite Runner are on my favorites list, as well as Atonement. I was worried that it was going to be a Keira Knightley vehicle more than anything else. But I was thrilled to be able to see James McAvoy again — he was brilliant (if overshadowed by Forrest Whitaker) in The Last King of Scotland. Then I saw a clip of McEwan saying he thought the screenplay was very good, so I had high hopes.
I think it’s terribly hard to cram everything from a book into a couple of hours, but I thought it was very faithful to the book, although my favorite part while reading was the lovely prose during Robbie’s turn in the Army, which was very shortened in the film, as it should be — who wants to watch people walking for days?
I think the ending of the movie had a little more clarity than the book, although I hated it didn’t end at the house. I also didn’t much like that part where everything rewinds — seemed a little gimmicky.
As for “No Country” I hadn’t read that book before I saw the film, but I have read McCarthy, so I was prepared for the great lines — as someone else said, the book pretty much wrote the screenplay. And I wasn’t expected it to be all neat and tidy at the end, which it wasn’t. Some folks were audibly upset by that in the theater when I saw it. But that’s McCarthy.
February 19th, 2008 at 11:11 am
The issue of books transformed into films is important because the process happens all the time and most readers seldom seem happy with the results. It has always seemed to me that genre fiction makes the easiest transition to the big screen because of the emphasis on plot and action and character. Novels that encompass highly verbal elements and narrative density are less easy to make into movies. Yes, there was a movie made of “Ulysses,” but it seemed almost beside the point; Joyce’s prose and narrative innovations simply could not be transferred to the screen. Neither film made from “Lolita,” while possessing multiple virtues — James Mason was a much better Humbert Humbert than Jeremy Irons and Dominique Swaine a better Lolita than Sue Lyons — could approach the verbal texture and ingenuity and the emotional depth of Nabokov’s novel. On the other hand, a thriller or mystery like “Mystic River,” which itself is a series of interlocking set-pieces that are highly evocative, makes a smooth translation to film.
Among the best film adaptations of a “literary” (or “literary-genre”) novel one would think would be difficult was the film of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” directed by George Roy Hill in 1972, three years after the novel was published. I watched this again last year, and while the screenplay and the narrative cannot be as mind-bending as the novel, it’s a faithful and noble adaptation.
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