I’ve been writing a lot about film adaptations lately, so I was thrilled to stumble onto this very cool series at the Guardian which each week is turning a critical eye on a new famous film adaptation. The latest is on Jean-Jacques Annaud’s 1986 version of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.
More Adaptation Mania
All That’s Missing is the “Screenplay”
With the announcement this morning of the Academy Award nominations, I looked to see which films were nominated for Best Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay. None of the nominees are all that shocking. The contenders for Best Picture are all up for awards in their respective screenplay categories (which means Supreme Hack Paul Haggis is nominated once again. Terrific.)The most interesting nomination by far is for Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, not so much because it is a comedy (after all, Little Miss Sunshine is a comedy), and not because it is offensive (frankly, so was last year's Best Picture winner). What's compelling to me about this particular nod is that, well, there was no script for Borat. According to the filmmakers, there was an outline, but then they let Borat loose and filmed what happened. Almost everything in the film is improvised. As Slate points out, we can't blame the Academy for this one, as the Writers' Guild actually nominated Borat for Best Adapted Screenplay and United 93, Paul Greengrass' brilliant portrayal of the doomed 9/11 flight, for Best Original Screenplay. Why would the Writers' Guild nominate two films that don't have scripts? It has something to do with "America's Next Top Model":It might seem that members of a writers guild would recoil from screenplay-free movies. But the guild is trying to expand its jurisdiction to reality shows. The production companies say those shows have no writers but the guild counters that those who shape the stories are in fact writers and deserve to be compensated as such. So, perhaps Fox should demand that Cohen withdraw Borat from consideration. Accepting a writing award for a film that is made for "an age in which reality and entertainment have become increasingly intertwined" might suggest that the guild's argument has merit after all.All of this further calls into question the Academy's division of the screenplay category into only two parts. It seems obvious that the Academy believes original scripts are a slightly different animal from those adapted from an existing source, but do they feel that something like Borat is really comparable to more traditional literary adaptations like Children of Men and Little Children (It was a good year for films with "Children" in the title)? I'm not sure there's an easy answer. With the immense financial success of heavily improvised films like Borat, United 93, and the Jackass movies, it seems we will be seeing more of this style of narrative. Can the Academy adapt?
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A House in the Country, An Ensemble Cast
There's something about an ensemble cast. And oh, the pastoral charms of a country house. Though I'd say this cinematic genre is English is certain fundamental ways, it works just as well elsewhere, a demonstrated by the list below (Italy, France, Greece, Los Angeles, Spain, Canada, the O.C.). One of the other interests of this genre is that some of its finest examples (Gosford Park, The Big Chill, Peter's Friends, and The Anniversary Party), work according to the classical unities (unity of time, unity of place, unity of action). Call them antiquated and fussy if you will, there is a certain satisfaction in a movie that stays put and, in something approximating "real time," resolves the troubles it introduces.Howard's EndGosford ParkMargot at the WeddingStealing BeautyThe Anniversary Party (Gwenynth Paltrow, John C. Reilly, Alan Cumming, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Parker Posey, Jennifer Beals and more - fab LA house)Peter's Friends (The Big Chill, across the pond: Emma Thompson, Kenneth Brannagh, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Imelda Staunton, Phyllida Law)The Big ChillSwimming Pool (Ludivigne Sangier avant nosejob)My Family and Other Animals (the inimitable Imelda Staunton and others - set in Greece, a must for animal lovers)"Arrested Development" (the dystopian take on the "country house"/ensemble cast)Mansfield ParkSense and Sensibility (Ang Lee's)Loaded (early Thandie Newton - a dark take on the genre)Belle Epoque (a young Penelope Cruz and a bevy of others easy on the eyes)"Jeeves and Wooster" (country estates-agogo, plus young Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie)Jules et JimThe Barbarian Invasions (Canadian Big Chill)My Summer of Love (Emily Blunt and Natalie Press - a gorgeous, disturbing watch - a little Swimming Pool-ish)Match Point (from Woody Allen's recent spasm of Anglophilia)"Brideshead Revisited" (I think they're remaking it, but a little Jeremy Irons never hurt anyone)Coming Home (a very young Kiera Knightly, Emily Mortimer, Paul Bettany, Peter O'Toole, Joanna Lumley - very "Brideshead")My Mother's Castle (ah, Provence)Happy Memorial Day.
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God Save the Kings!
For fans of Deadwood, the mere name Ian McShane might be enough to tempt you to watch Kings, NBC's new midseason drama (Sundays 8pm Eastern). But that's hardly where the attractions end. The show is visually stylish, reminiscent of the 90s Ethan Hawke Hamlet and of Julie Taymor's Titus Andronicus in that it offers a mixed historical and cultural vibe: urban, corporate, downtown Manhattan meets the dark paneling, pageantry, and aristocratic dynastic feuding of Tudor-Stuart England, complete with state-sponsored murder of public figures who won't toe the company line (and I mean that literally - this new quasi-American aristocracy headed by Ian McShane as King Silas Benjamin is backed secretly by corporate funding from the king's brother-in-law). If you ever wanted to watch Rome, The O.C., Deadwood, and Wall Street simultaneously - while reading Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, this show's for you.And the production value is high, especially for network: Fans of (the underappreciated) Constantine and I Am Legend, take note that Frances Lawrence is the director (at least of these early episodes). From the opening shot of the young King David-to-be (though he doesn't know it yet), backlit and surrounded by bits of shining dandelion down while playing with his dog on the family farm to the pilot's final shot of this same heir apparent being crowned by Nature herself, you will not find a more beautiful new show on television. It's too soon to say if this show will be smart. Kings' melodramatic bent may get the better of it, but I hope that it doesn't. I think our culture could use a television show that dramatizes the necessary tensions and tragedies of a country perpetually at war, and this show does this - though I think it might do it too beautifully to be quite ethical.The show's most explicit allusion is to the Old Testament story of David and Goliath - at least that's the story we have majestically and heavy-handedly invoked in the pilot (available free on Amazon -- 4/2 Update: Apparently, the "free" thing was a limited time offer. Now it'll run you $1.99): only this David is a soldier in the army of a country that seems to be somewhat reminiscent of a U.S. post-9-11, and Goliath is a kind of armored tank used by a northern enemy of this future U.S.-ish country (yes, I know, the idea of Canada at war with the U.S. - slightly implausible; "Canada - the world's gay friend," as Jon Stewart once put it). The Australian actor who plays young David, Chris Egan, seems to have been made in a lab from fused bits of DNA taken from Leonardo DiCaprio, Josh Hartnett, and Ryan Phillipe - and he can act, he's not just easy on the eyes. The abilities of the magisterial Ian McShane (for whom some of the script might have been Deadwood/David Milch-ified to recollect his immortal performance as Al Swearengen) go without saying, as do those of actors like Wes Studi (Magua in Last of the Mohicans) who plays General Linus Abner.It remains to be seen where Kings is going, but I haven't seen any television show so beautiful and potentially interesting in a long time. I am usually disappointed, but I hope.
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After Tony: A Literary Speculation
I remember when I first started watching The Sopranos: early winter in the small town in Oklahoma where my then-girlfriend (now wife) had gone to work among the Cherokees. I was on a break from college, but my girlfriend got a grand total of something like four days off around Christmas (this notwithstanding the prominence of Christianity in the culture of Tahlequah). And so, from 7:30 in the morning until 6:00 at night, I was on my own. Believe me when I say: there is no winter like an Oklahoma winter. I'd write in the morning and then, in the afternoon, distract myself from the endless flat grayness of the country outside the living room window by reading books and watching movies.This was back in the days of VHS, and one day at the Blockbuster I picked up a tape with the first three episodes of this premium-cable-channel show I'd been hearing so much about: The Sopranos. It was love at first sight. Aside from the searing performances of the leads and a memorable character turn from a minor hero of mine, "Miami" Steve Van Zandt of the E Street Band, the show offered all of the addictive pleasures of serial storytelling. This, I think, was what made The Sopranos feel so much like a novel. It was Dickens with gabbagul in place of figgy pudding. (And mightn't Copperfield's Barkis have recognized a kindred soul in Silvio Dante? Or Mr. Micawber tendered to Paulie Walnuts some prolix offer of friendship?)Seven and a half years later, the titular Sopranos have reached the end of their long and erratic arc, and heat and humidity are on the rise in Brooklyn. (Believe me when I say: there is no summer like a New York summer.) And the question arises: how to fill the empty place Tony & Co. have left behind? How to pass the long summer afternoons?The obvious quick fix for those suffering from Sopranos withdrawal is The Godfather, but Puzo's dialogue might feel a bit flat after David Chase's. So here's a suggestion: Robert Graves' I, Claudius and Claudius the God bear more than a passing resemblance to The Sopranos, and are similarly well-written and densely plotted. Given that the murderous matriarchs of these narratives are both named Livia, I wonder if Chase wasn't inspired by Graves. Beneath the disparate Italian settings - Rome at the time of Christ and Jersey in the time of American Idol (how far we've come) - The Sopranos and I, Claudius are both sagas of intrigue and betrayal, of men whose ability to trust their friends and loved ones wanes as their proximity to power increases.If it's the psychodrama of The Sopranos that appeals to you, however, I can recommend an even less likely analogue: Joseph Heller's Something Happened. Here, trust is also at a premium. The setting is not a mob war-zone, however, but ranges from the WASPy corridors of a Fortune 500 company to the bucolic suburbs of Connecticut. Like Tony Soprano, Heller's Bob Slocum is an upwardly mobile executive suffering from moral rot. He is as unpleasant to spend time with as Tony has been this season, and yet his intertwined rage and loneliness seem to shed some kind of bleak light on the human condition.Heller is, I think, a vastly underrated prose writer. His prefers a limited diction to the omnivorous vocabulary of fellow-travelers like John Barth and Thomas Pynchon, but his syntactic subtlety yields sentences of arresting power. Check out this outburst from Slocum, worthy of Dr. Melfi's office: "Even fancy bakeries now use a substitute for whipped cream that looks more like whipped cream than whipped cream does, keeps its color and texture longer, doesn't spoil, and costs much less, yielding larger profits. [...] It tastes like s--t. Nobody cares but me. From sea to shining sea the country is filling with slag, shale, and used-up automobile tires. The fruited plain is coated with insecticide and chemical fertilizers. Even pure horses--t is hard to come by these days. They add preservatives. You don't find fish in lakes and rivers anymore. You have to catch them in cans. Towns die. Oil spills. Money talks. God listens. God is good, a real team player. 'America the Beautiful' isn't: it was all over the day the first white man set foot on the continent to live."It's all here, in embryonic form: the rage, the narcissism, the depression, the nostalgia, the soured aspirations. (Not to mention the serial infidelity and a climax suspiciously reminiscent of the death of Christopher Moltisanti this season on The Sopranos.) I don't know whether David Chase has read Something Happened, but the section headings Heller uses to structure Slocum's 550-page monologue could just as easily describe the trajectory of seven seasons of The Sopranos: "I get the willies"; "My daughter's unhappy"; "My little boy is having difficulties"; "There's no getting around it"...Perhaps most significantly, Chase and Heller are both willing to take literally the Freudian constructs that postmodern discourse has reduced to the level of metaphor, or bumper sticker. Slocum and Soprano are men haunted by a small handful of dreams and traumas (e.g., by their love for and resentment of their mothers). And every interaction out in the great world is in some way a Freudian replaying of a domestic trauma. As psychology, this might not be as nuanced as what you'd get in your local therapists' office, but it comes cheaper, and in deft hands attains the mythic resonance of art. In Something Happened, especially, we see the way that every conflict comes back to the primal fourfold of Slocum's household: man, woman, girl, boy. Every man is father, son, and brother, and every woman is mother, wife, and sister. And, returning to The Sopranos, we find that, however baroque the FBI's organizational charts get, it really is all about family, this thing of ours.In the thirty years since its publication,Something Happened has been obscured by the long shadow cast by Heller's first novel, Catch-22. But I have no doubt that, on the bookshelves of the future, nestled between the DVD boxed sets, there will be a place for it... as there will be for The Sopranos. This summer, before you move on to Deadwood, or to the BBC's miniseries version of I, Claudius, you might pick up Something Happened for your maintenance dose of literary misanthropy.
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Who Gets to Change? Representation in ‘Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri’
The heart of the problem lies in McDonagh’s directorial choices. The few critics who found his movie manipulative and historically tone deaf agree this is our generation’s Crash: where white characters learn a lesson on the backs of black people.
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Poetry, Jarmusch Style
During college, two of my English-majoring friends had a running argument, years long, about whether "Pale Fire,” the 999-line poem that begins Vladimir Nabokov’s novel of the same name, is good or not. The poem is attributed to the fictional writer John Shade, and the rest of the novel takes the form of an unhinged and digressive commentary on it by Shade’s neighbor. There’s no doubt about the quality of the commentary (as commentary, as opposed to a satire of one), nor about the quality of novel, but what of the poem? Usually, fictional works of art are framed as clearly good or bad by the larger works they are within, but occasionally their status is more interestingly ambiguous.
Jim Jarmusch’s new film Paterson follows a week in the life of Paterson, a Paterson, N.J., bus driver played by Adam Driver. (Many of its jokes are of this sort.) It is admirably quiet and prosaic, refreshingly so in a time when it can feel like 50 percent of films include the computer generated destruction of a metropolis. It is also remarkably thought provoking, raising questions about why people write poetry, whether they need readers, and who merits the label “poet.” More than any other, however, the film left me with the question of whether it -- and Jarmusch -- thinks Paterson’s poetry is any good.
Paterson writes, if the week we see is typical, about a poem a day. We witness him thinking through the first lines over breakfast and his walk to work, then writing in his “secret notebook” (as his wife calls it) as he waits to set out on his first route of the day, on his lunch break, and at his basement desk at home. Certainly the film seems to celebrate his words: paired with Driver’s voiceover, they are inscribed on the screen, both as they are being drafted and in apparently finished form. Yet Paterson is uninterested in showing his poetry to anyone. His wife seems to have read, or heard, a few of them, and constantly hectors him to make copies and share them with the world, but he is clearly reluctant to do so.
The counterpoint of Paterson’s wife, Laura (played by Golshifteh Farahani), suggests all the more that the film thinks Paterson’s poetry is good. She flits from daydream to daydream about how she will become famous -- for her cupcakes, or as a Nashville singer with her newly bought guitar -- and the film gently mocks these dreams, as well as her many design projects around the house. Yet no such mockery is pointed toward Paterson’s work.
Films can make any poem seem greater than it is, and of much deeper significance -- or go too far in such a direction, turning it into overwrought bombast, as Dead Poet’s Society did for Walt Whitman and, more recently, Interstellar for Dylan Thomas. Despite this, Paterson’s poetry still seems, at best, merely mediocre. It is styled after that of William Carlos Williams, son of Paterson, N.J., and hero of both Driver’s character and the film. Williams is repeatedly discussed, Paterson recites “This Is Just to Say” at his wife’s request, and his book Paterson is obviously visible on the main character’s shelf (along with other collections of poetry and Infinite Jest, a book I cannot imagine Driver’s character reading, which Jarmusch also visually fetishized, more convincingly, in Only Lovers Left Alive). Unlike Williams’s poetry, however, Paterson’s seemed to me unnecessarily baggy, occasionally finding a good line or two, but only after far too much preamble, not just conversational, but plain in its diction and rhythm to the point of banality.
I was surprised to learn, then, that Paterson’s lines were in fact written, some especially for the film (others have appeared elsewhere), by the poet Ron Padgett, an award-winning member of the New York School (itself name-checked, via Frank O’Hara, in the film). Unless Jarmusch means to insult his friend, this makes me think he means to present the poems as good. Otherwise, why not write them himself? Poetry of Williams’s sort is not hard to write, only hard to write well. Did Padgett, in the poems written for the film, take on the persona of a lesser talent? The film features one other poem, written by a 10-year-old girl with whom Paterson falls into conversation. This one was actually written by Jarmusch, and the film presents it as no worse than Paterson’s (that is Padgett’s) work: Driver’s character seems genuinely moved by it, and he recites its opening lines to his wife later that night. Does Jarmusch intend to lower Paterson’s status, or to elevate the young girl?
Paterson exists thought-provokingly, though I am not sure fully purposefully, in the space created by the ambiguity of whether Paterson’s poetry is any good. If it were clearly bad, then the film would become cruel. If it were clearly good, then the film would become something else, a hackneyed gem-in-the-rough story. Twice in the film, Paterson is presented with the opportunity to call himself a poet. Neither time does he. He is interested in poetry, likes poetry, but he doesn’t even admit he writes it, neither to the young girl, nor to a Japanese poet on pilgrimage to the hometown of William Carlos Williams. Where Williams was a doctor, Paterson is a bus driver and thinks of himself merely as that. Unlike Williams, he writes only for himself.
Near the end of the film, Paterson’s notebook is destroyed (a move so heavily telegraphed that this really isn’t a spoiler). His wife is devastated by the loss -- clearly she daydreams about his future fame as well -- but Paterson’s own reaction is opaque. He says almost nothing: is he in shock or remarkably stoic? Does he not especially care, or perhaps even feel a little relieved? We briefly wonder if he will stop writing or, alternatively, now write to publish, his juvenilia swept away. Instead, he simply returns to his routine, it seems: his poems, it is suggested, are for him, and him alone. They help him find meaning in his otherwise routine life, and that’s enough -- anything else would be too much, too grandiose, too, well, poetic, for his merely prosaic existence.
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One Fast Move Or I’m Gone: A Review
I didn't have a costume for Halloween. I did, however, attend a horror show, in the form of a documentary called One Fast Move or I'm Gone: Kerouac's Big Sur. After a short junior high love affair with On the Road, I've never been particularly interested in Jack Kerouac. But I didn't have anything else to do, and I miss California, and I thought I could enjoy the scenery and learn a thing or two. In retrospect, I think that my past disinclination to revere Kerouac stemmed from a spooky presentiment that a movie like this would be made about him. The promise of this foul enterprise lurked in every high school yearbook page, in every reference to the mad ones and the roman candles and the burning sensation. In this film, all of the maudlin silliness which Kerouac unwittingly spawned is made manifest.
The premise of the film is as follows: Several fixtures from Kerouac's life (Carolyn Cassady, Joyce Johnson, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, among others) were interviewed about Kerouac and specifically, his breakdown in Big Sur. Additionally, a bewildering crew of actors and artists was assembled and given a paperback copy of the book. I'm sure the people involved are great people and good performers in their respective milieux, but they were such a very motley crew, with so little obvious connection to the work and people and places involved, that it was comically weird and distracting. Instead of listening to their insights about Kerouac (such as they were), I spent a lot of time racking my brain, trying to figure out if Donal Logue was in The Lord of the Rings (he's not).
There is also Amber Tamblyn (her dad was Dr. Jacoby on Twin Peaks, and she is particularly criminal in this movie when she shakes her head and says "Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack," as though he had once taken a pair of her underpants), John Ventimiglia (who was on The Sopranos and has a very nice reading voice), S.E. Hinton (she wrote The Outsiders, which is neat), Aram Saroyan (minimalist poet, novelist, son of William), and Dar Williams (a singer-songwriter who is responsible for the shocking nadir of the film, when she cries on camera). Then there are Tom Waits and Patti Smith, whom I suspect were brought in because they are perceived as having a never-ending fund of "cred." I have seen Fishing With John, and I know that Tom Waits is a veritable one-man cred festival, but all he does here is flip pages and rub his face and growl.
I will say, though, that Tom Waits did have the good sense not to participate in the beach bonfire, during which some members of the crew hang out in the sand, drink, and talk about Jack (Jack, Jack, Jack). Which was probably really fun to do, but is excruciating to watch.
To make things even more confusing, sometimes you hear this crooning, and you think, "Is that the guy from Death Cab for Cutie," and it is that guy.
This is a cast that, when describing the purportedly tragic death of Kerouac's cat, not only makes it not sad, but actually raises a chuckle from (at least two) members of the audience. The film also does the near-impossible and makes San Francisco and Big Sur look hideous. Perhaps this was to show the twisted darkness of Jack Kerouac's soul. I'm not sure, but the whole thing is very grainy and made for unpleasant viewing.
Carolyn Cassady was a highlight of the film. For one, people who knew the subject are always more interesting to hear from than someone who was on hundreds of unrelated TV shows long after the subject's death. Also, Carolyn Cassady had relations with both Neal Cassady and Kerouac, and it's neat to hear what she has to say about it all (I think what she actually says on that particular aspect was something like "It was nice for me," which I thought was a hoot, especially since it came after a shot of the famous photo of Kerouac and Cassady, this photo being why I think they invented the lewd expression about wanting to be the meat in a given sandwich.)
My understanding is that Kerouac and his contemporaries were zany and drug-addled and sometimes brilliant and sometimes just crazy, and as such there are a multitude of stories and anecdotes about all of them; it's an embarrassment of riches. This movie, in trying to showcase a handful of the riches, is mostly just an embarrassment (I don't know what Dar Williams' music is like, but I'm telling you, the crying scene was very, very bad).
I was moderately happy I saw it, though. It is kind of an unintentional laugh riot. Also, the production and most of the commentary are so comically bad that they highlight Kerouac's writing, which in part narrates the action (such as it is). I have avoided Kerouac's work for so long that I had forgotten, if I ever knew, how startling and beautiful it can be, even if it is often responsible for bone-chilling jazzy readings and scat flights.
It is marginally interesting to hear from the people who knew Kerouac. And there is nothing intrinsically wrong with making a movie about how a group of unrelated randoms perceive a particular work. This group, though, was like a drunken, barely-prepared book club, whose members interrupt one another to say "Oh shit! I loved that part! That was so awesome!" Which, as I said, is fun to do and not fun to watch.
Two thumbs down!
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