Two Film Adaptations

“Of course, the book was better than the movie.”
This pop culture cliché can be heard in the lobbies of movie theaters across the country as theater goers exit the latest cinematic adaptation of some literary masterpiece or bestseller. However, this is often not true. Coppola’s film of The Godfather far surpasses Mario Puzo’s seventies potboiler. Gone With the Wind lives on as a movie, while the novel has gone the way of other massive bestsellers which proved to be blips on the cultural radar like Forever Amber, or Once is Not Enough. Have you actually read Ben-Hur, or have you just seen the movie?

Making a novel into a movie must be a tricky business. What do you include and what do you leave out? How do you make the transition between the interactive activity that is reading and the mostly passive activity of watching the movie? How do you capture the tone of a written work, which is created by the author with words, using visual imagery? Recently, I watched two movies based on novels I’ve read and loved-The Kite Runner and No Country For Old Men.

I loved the novel version of The Kite Runner. I loved the evocation of pre-Soviet Kabul and the relationship between two Afghan boys named Amir and Hassan. The inciting incident occurs when Hassan is raped by some thugs and his friend Amir does nothing to help him. In the book, it is clear that Hassan has seen Amir witnessing his humiliation and he knows his friend has let him down. Hassan forgives Amir, but Amir cannot handle the guilt of not doing anything to help his friend, and it ruins the boys’ friendship. The movie stays true to the plot of the book, but it leaves out the key details of Hassan’s gaze falling on Amir as Hassan is raped. Since the rest of the story is basically Amir trying to pay penance for failing to help his friend, the loss of this key detail is significant. This film feels like a Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation. What we are seeing is basically sections of the novel brought to life rather than a work of art that can stand on its own. The movie is thoughtful and well-made (except for some truly cheesy CGI kites), but it lack the sense of passion and outrage that should have shown up in nearly every scene of this movie. It is a pale shadow of the novel.

Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men, an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name, is a work of art that stands on its own terms. The film’s directors have managed the minor miracle of approximating, through the use of dialogue and spare, nearly elegant, camera movements, the sense of foreboding and inevitability that pervades the novel. The Coen brothers have abandoned the tricky camera work they used in Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, and Miller’s Crossing. They are not making fun of the rural, west Texas characters, as they did the Minnesotans in Fargo. The visual language they use matches the famously spare language of McCarthy’s novels. They are also assisted by some very strong performances from Kelly Macdonald, Josh Brolin, Javier Barden and Tommy Lee Jones. Jones is especially good. His Sheriff Tom Bell seems the embodiment of a lost time and place, and makes the title meaningful. The movie refuses to explain things. The viewer is never really clear as to the role all of characters play in the plot. The villain is not caught, and there is no explanation of why exactly the principal characters act the way they do. The viewer leaves the theater with his mind still deciphering what he as seen, but with no sense of having been cheated, and that to me is the sign of a good movie.