A few weeks ago, I listed five film adapations from literary sources that I thought were particularly well done. Today, I am outlining four that I found underwhelming and one that was downright awful …
Bruno Anthony (Walker) is suave and convincing, like all the best sociopaths, entangling wealthy, popular Guy Haines (Granger), who is only looking to perfect his life by marrying moneyed, elegant Ann (Roman), requiring him to divorce the scheming Miriam (Rogers).
It’s tense and claustrophobic, full of actions and twists—but unforgivably, it shys away from the splinter of ice in the heart of Highsmith’s original, a splinter that characterises and is essential to the power of her work. The fact that she performed the excision herself does not make it any better. Heartbreakers.
The main problem with this film was the desire to make a commercially successful, or at least popular, film from a book whose main characteristic is complexity—the subtle, multifarious interconnectedness of everything.
Eco intended the book to be accessible at different levels. Anyone could read it as a complex detective story with a medieval setting, a cross between Val McDermid and Brother Cadfael with an explicit nod to Sherlock Holmes. A reader with some knowledge of medieval history would get a little more, with a knowledge of theological conflict, more again, and so on.
A film of the book as a whole would be a very different film. For what it did, it wasn't bad: it looks great, they did not mess about with the murder-mystery layer that they had selected, Seán Connery was perfectly solid as William of Baskerville, and the fate of the library as devastating on screen as it was on the page.
A good job, but only a fraction of the original, retaining (as Eco apparently said) only the lettuce from a club sandwich.
A lot of the tensions, or imperatives, in Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow lie in the main character's detached and inexorable response to her deeply-felt anger at particular injustices. The sense of inexorability was supported by the material details, but there is a limit to how much cinematic time can be spent on this, especially when there are more 'thriller-y' elements to be mined.
The other reservation I had was about Julia Ormond as Smilla Jaspersen. Ormond is, as always, excellent. But Smilla is a person of strong contrasts, and maintains them doggedly. Frances McDormand might have carried off commenting on her Valencienne ruffles on one page and seizing both ends of her stepmother in throttling grips on another, but Ormond can’t; she is too uncomplicatedly gamine and glamorous.
The film makes a good effort, but sides too much with the action-thriller possibilities to really do justice to the other qualities of the book.
It can’t be easy to find a child actor who is sufficiently good at acting to carry a heavy role like Lyra Belacqua, happens to look right for the character, and looks right for a commercial film: that they did not succeed in the first two criteria is not surprising. In addition, the dialogue is a bit unleavened, but they were working from a somewhat ponderous source.
On the other hand, there ought to have been plenty of support to hold up the resultant weak spots in the film—it is great material, with a strong and distinctive aesthetic, packed with adventure and high moments, and they had a stellar cast, including Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, and Christopher Lee.
But there is something terribly shadowless about it. It’s very good in many ways, full of vim, and dash, and great scenes (and Sam Elliot is excellent). It is all very polished, and swirly-magic, and steampunk, with airships and armoured bears, but being so polished, it has the air of something expertly, but soullessly, done.
Pullman’s books (apart from the dialogue) are outstanding. They are unmistakeable. This film does not have any outstanding quality, it fits in to its genre too well—it is, literally, generic.
5. Alice in Wonderland (2010), dir. Tim Burton, starring Mia Wasikowska, Helena Bonham-Carter, Anne Hathaway, and Johnny Depp among others, and the voices of Alan Rickman, Christopher Lee, and others. “Based” on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871).
The innate anarchy of Lewis Carroll's original is crushed here, by the results of the common, but depressing, conviction that a cracking good classic story can be improved upon by adding or intensifying an emotional factor.
Tim Burton (and Linda Woolverton, who wrote the screenplay) ripped the hearts out of both of Carroll’s Alice stories, to produce a flaccid amalgamation of fantasy tropes. This Alice is not the unshakable, resourceful focus of a wild, anarchic plunge into unreality and mathematics, but a yawn-inducing late-teen social rebel, marriage-dodger, and saviour of the world, battling the Big Bad—the Red Queen and the Jabberwocky.
Most the characters from Carroll’s book appear, burderned with heavy-handedly quirky names (the White Rabbit, for example, is now Nivens McTwisp), and a role in the newly politicized world. We are not just through the looking-glass anymore, but in the Underworld, where Good (or at least, Irritating) clashes with, if not Evil, then at least Big Meanies.
Carroll's remarkable imagination is replaced by over-engineered appearances, and a frankly smug tendency to relentlessly extend scenes (like Alice's fall down the rabbit-hole) just to show off the CGI budget. Twitchy, exaggerated performances dominate, in a sickly aesthetic somewhere between Barbieland and mandrill monkey.
It is a travesty, and is virtually unwatchable.
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