Giving Maisie a happy ending

For the whole time I've loved What Maisie Knew -- it came out in 2013, so that's 13 years -- I've been fascinated by the fact that it was based on an 1897 novel by Henry James. I thought "I should read that novel someday."

I'd look for it absently in book stores, never finding it, never worrying too much about that fact. Then for some reason, in the past year, I became more interested in converting on this desire, even though it's been since 2019 that I've seen the movie, when I was reviewing contenders for my best of the last decade. (It finished 18th.) Back in February I found it at a book store in Carlton, and snapped it up.

The other thing reading What Maisie Knew would give me is it would allow me to stick to my plan of making every second book I read relate to cinema. This is not exactly what I had in mind when I set out to do that, but it worked for the exercise because it would allow me to compare and contrast a modern-day adaptation of a classic novel with the novel itself. Which I did as soon as I finished reading the novel on Tuesday, getting my reward by watching the movie for the fourth time that very night. 

Little did I know how different the book would be, and how much I ultimately didn't care for it.

I suppose this is my tried-and-true philosophy in action again, where I always say you like the first version of a thing you come across the best, even if someone could argue that the second version is "objectively" better -- if it means anything at all to talk about objectivity when it comes to taste. But James' original novel, which was printed over a number of weeks and months as a serial in the New Review, is quite a different, quite a bleaker view on these events and characters. Having loved the far more humanist view on them, it's not what I was expecting or hoping.

I hope you've seen What Maisie Knew by now, but I will include a SPOILER ALERT because I'm sure there are quite a few of you who haven't.

To synopsize the movie first, it's the story of the titular young girl, who would appear to be about six or seven, and who is the daughter of a warring unmarried couple who are both successful -- or, have historically been -- in the arts. Onata Aprile plays that young girl. Her mother is Susanna (Julianne Moore), an aging rock star who is still successful enough to be involved in a new album and a new tour. Her father is Beale -- the one character who keeps his name from the novel -- and is played by Steve Coogan. He's an art dealer. They are separated by the things that usually separate people, particularly successful people, and each takes up with a new partner in order to help their position in the custody battle over Maisie. Beale marries Maisie's nanny, Margo (Joanna Vanderham), in part because she's very pretty and in part because he imagines that Maisie's already close relationship to Margo will benefit him in any custody argument. As a fast and desperate reaction, Susanna marries Lincoln (Alexander Skarsgard), a bartender in her circle of friends and hangers on, even though it's unclear how well she really knows him and whether he has any experience looking after young children. He'll get a lot more really quickly, as Maisie's parents' neglectful ways leave them in the hands of these stepparents way too often, frequently without properly ensuring their availability, and in violation of their own custody responsibilities. Margo and Lincoln, who are both good to their core, develop a relationship with one another and create, effectively, a surrogate family that does not involve either of Maisie's original biological parents. 

And that's a happy ending. The last shot of the film is Maisie running down a dock toward a boat, this boat ride having been something she'd been anticipating for a couple days, with a huge smile plastered across her face. Aprile is astonishing in this movie and I'm sorry her career petered out by her mid-teens after only a handful of other roles.

The book has no interest in this happy ending.

The book, of course, was the only version of the story that existed for more than a hundred years. Actually there was a 1968 TV series and a 58-minute film in 1975, and a French TV movie in 1993. But I have to assume that these all stick more or less to James' novel. And until Scott McGehee and David Siegel interpreted the material in 2013, from a script by Nancy Doyne and Carroll Cartwright, it had likely always ended in disappointment for Maisie. 

First my general impression of the book.

Although this is a book with a lot of clever language, the kind that occasionally gives you an exact and exquisite appreciation of the author's meaning, it feels quite a bit like a hundred pages of story in a 275-page book. The rest is description that is baroque enough in its construction that I frequently gave up the effort of trying to make out exactly what was being conveyed in any individual sentence. I'm no dummy, mind you -- I was an English major in college and have read all sorts of classic literature, much of it with relish. This, though, I found to be a bit of a slog, which is why it took me more than two months to read it. 

One thing that frequently makes it difficult to discern everything James is saying is that he refers to characters in euphemisms, like "their friend" rather than a character's name. The stepfather, too, has a bad habit of referring to Maisie, somewhat ironically I suppose, with phrases like "my good man" and "old boy." (I noticed the movie plays lightly on this. There's one scene where Lincoln calls Maisie a "wise guy," and when he protests that she's a girl, he changes it to "wise girl.")

The bigger disappointment with James' novel, though, is where it ultimately lands. 

To spoil the novel also, the larger narrative gestures are the same as presented by McGehee, Siegel, Doyne and Cartwright, only taking place in turn-of-the-century England and (a small bit) France rather than in New York City. And the Margo and Lincoln characters, there called Sir Claude and Miss Overmore, do appear to end up with each other, despite a lot more fighting and a lot less certainty. They just don't end up with Maisie.

That's right, at the end of James' What Maisie Knew, Maisie goes off with her governess, Miss Wix.

Miss Wix is meant to be a bit of a ridiculous character, an older woman who is quite proper and has an especial fascination with/fixation on Sir Claude. To give you an idea of how I imagined her in my head, though, I had her looking like Margaret Hamilton from The Wizard of Oz. Which is not a very good sign of her promise as someone Maisie should end up with. 

Why does Maisie go with Miss Wix at the end? Well, even though she loves Sir Claude and seems to be okay with Miss Overmore as well, she doesn't celebrate their potential union, their ability to become a new makeshift family free from either of the biological parents, who are even worse in the novel than they are in the movie. (The kinder portrayal of these two in the film is consistent with the collective humanism on display.) Instead, she asks Sir Claude to give Miss Overmore up. Unlike in the film, she comes across as potentially a lot less worthy than he is -- that's 1897 for you -- so we don't necessarily blame Maisie for making her choice. But when Miss Wix -- who, you remember, is prim and proper, as well as stuck on Sir Claude -- can't sanction the union, she actually takes Maisie off with her, and the stepparents let them go. The implication is that Maisie doesn't object to this because she thinks this relationship will end up the same way her parents' relationship ended up. 

Huh?

The Miss Wix character, who is perhaps even more significant than either of the absent parents in the novel, does have a corollary in Siegel and McGehee's film. And here she is indeed a replacement for when Beale poaches the nanny to make her his wife, though in the novel they call this a governess rather than a nanny, the one in charge of Maisie's education. But the Miss Wix in the movie isn't even named -- Paddy Croft does get credited as "Mrs. Wix" on IMDB -- and she's in about three scenes before disappearing entirely. One might think she died, given that we see her once falling asleep while looking after Maisie. 

It's interesting to me that the collaborators on this film should have felt that James missed so badly with the way he originally wrote these characters. I have no choice but to view their decision as correct, given that I have a 13-year relationship with those characters from the movie, and only a two-month relationship with the characters from the book. But their movie essentially changes the entire outcome of the events from James' novel, and in my estimation it is for the far, far better. 

I do wonder if they might have envisioned a more faithful adaptation of the book, but that there was no realistic prospect of this selling. I hope that's not the case, because I think the way this movie goes is truly brilliant, and the chemistry between Skarsgard and Vanderham is just heart swooningly romantic. But what if they wanted to make a What Maisie Knew that ended unhappily, but their backers just told them this would never sell in the 2013 cinematic marketplace?

I hope that's not the case, because there's nothing cheap about this happy ending. Some movies will end happily despite ample evidence that they should not, and those are the sort we should look on suspiciously. What Maisie Knew ends happily for Maisie but at the cost of the fact that both of her biological parents have effectively given her up. (Beale initially tries to woo her to return to England with him, before realizing it's just not practical, but then he proceeds with his plans to decamp from New York anyway. Susanna fights tooth and nail not to exit her daughter's life, but she's ultimately more committed to her career than her daughter.)

So while this is, indeed, a happy ending, and especially for the kind souls Margo and Lincoln, it might be the sort of happy ending that James himself could have gotten behind, if he weren't being poisoned by an ultimate sense of bitterness and misanthropy. 

The end of a different Affair

With all my talk of Love Affair and An Affair to Remember two weeks ago on this blog, you'd think Sunday night's viewing of The End of the Affair might have something to do with that.

You'd be wrong, and it would be a different End of the Affair than you might think.

In December I read Graham Greene's celebrated 1951 novel The End of the Affair, which was recommended to me by a friend who called it his favorite book. Since I'd actually borrowed his copy, I moved it straight to the top of my reading list in order to avoid one of those "perpetual loan" situations we all dread. 

I really liked the book. Not a personal favorite maybe, but quite a quick read and quite an anguished look inside the head of a narrator full of jealousy and loathing, which I hadn't remembered being the default condition of Ralph Fiennes' character in the 1999 Neil Jordan film, where he was opposite Julianne Moore. Nor had I remembered the story was so much about spiritual yearning, involving a promise to God and then a desperate urge not to believe in that God in order to break that promise.

Usually when I finish reading a book that has a well-known film version, I watch the film version pretty soon afterward, whether I'd already seen it or not. Therefore, I expected to queue up the Jordan film, which I'd also quite liked, pretty soon after the start of January.

That being my busy time of year in terms of viewings, though, I hadn't gotten to it until Sunday night.

But when I couldn't find it on any of my streaming services, including the streaming service everyone has (Internet Archive), I turned to iTunes, where I noticed not one, but two filmed versions of Greene's novel to choose from. 

Instead of choosing the one I'd seen, I spontaneously decided to choose the one I hadn't seen.

That's the 1955 version directed by Edward Dmytryk whose poster you see above. It stars the always fascinating Deborah Kerr, Van Johnson (whom I've seen plenty of times, but whose films I could not identify without the assistance of IMDB) and perhaps most importantly in terms of clinching the decision for me, Peter Cushing, who played Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars. 

And I think I liked it even more than Jordan's version.

I wasn't sure that would be the case at the start. Dmytryk's film, from a screenplay by Lenore Coffee, tells the story of Henry and Sarah Miles and Maurice Bendrix chronologically, which is a departure from a book published only four years earlier. In the book, we meet narrator Bendrix, appropriately, after his affair with Sarah has already ended. From my limited memory of Jordan's film, that's where that film starts as well -- and perhaps one of the reasons Jordan wanted to adapt the material was to correct the "mistake" made by Dmytryk and Coffee. It definitely seemed like it would be the less courageous choice, to feed this classic novel, which at the time was really only a contemporary novel, to audiences in the most common chronology available that they would be able to understand most easily.

By the end of the film, though, I was so wrapped up in the characters, in the performances, and in the choices made to adapt the book that I found myself giving the film 4.5 stars on Letterboxd, half a star higher than the admittedly flawed 4-star rating for Jordan's film -- flawed because I gave it out retroactively, some dozen years after I'd seen it.

Is this one of those recency bias things, or a case of me already trying to stack the deck for next year's "ten best movies I saw in 2024 that weren't from 2024?" Or another sort of bias, the "I just read this book and therefore would be more favorably inclined than average toward an adaptation of it" sort of bias?

Possibly. But Coffee and her director made all the right moves here, which I won't discuss in detail because it's likely you haven't recently read this book or seen either version of the movie, so it would fall on deaf ears.

One thing I am wondering, though, is whether this means there will be one more Affair in my near future. Now it feels like I must rewatch Jordan's version. If comparing a recently read book and its film adaptation is a good exercise on a blog -- or really, just a good cinephile exercise that helps expand your appreciation of the screenwriting process -- then comparing that book with two different adaptations, separated in time by 44 years, is even better. 

Understanding The Big Sleep better, not liking it much better

If you saw Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep on my viewing schedule this week, you'd have good reason to assume it was the last in my Audient Classics monthly series. (Except if you looked closely you'd notice I watched it in November, and I had already watched The Passion of Joan of Arc for that series in November.)

It meets two of the three criteria for inclusion in that series:

1) It was released before I was born;

2) I have seen it only once.

It's the crucial third criterion where The Big Sleep comes up way short:

3) I had really liked the movie.

So why was I watching a noir I hadn't liked very much, starring an actor whom I shun as often as I embrace, on Wednesday night?

Well that was also the day I finished reading Raymond Chandler's book.

I had selected it off the shelf in our house, which is how I get about half the books I read. My wife has a huge collection of books I've never read, so there's always something to read among possessions we already have under our own roof. 

Chandler's book presented me a unique opportunity. If I read this book, maybe I could make sense of why Hawks' movie was such a big miss for me when I saw it back in 2013 -- hey, exactly ten years ago this month, now that we're in December. Then of course I would watch the movie again, always with the blog post I'm currently writing in the back of my mind as additional motivation for the whole thing.

Grappling with my dislike of The Big Sleep has actually been a big motivator for me in the decade since I saw it. It was one of the driving factors for why I did a series on film noir in 2021 -- a series that brought me my favorite Humphrey Bogart movie of all time, Key Largo.

When I started reading the book, it felt like I was off to the races. I immediately took to Chandler's writing and his clipped yet evocative way of describing things, like he was Philip Marlowe himself, but also a gifted writer. (The book is written in first person singular, so the confluence of the writer and his character is not such a surprise.)

About 70 or 80 pages into a 217-page book, my progress stalled for a good three weeks. I was starting to succumb to the same character confusion that had plagued me during the entirety of my viewing of the movie ten years ago. I'd read only a page or two here and there, and was almost tempted to stop reading the book, except I never do that. Maybe noir really just isn't my thing. 

Then a week or two ago, I picked up the pace again and finished on a high note, getting back on track with the story and continuing to love Chandler's way of saying things. The story details became clearer and I could keep everyone straight, and I loved the way the book ended.

Loved it so much that I rented the movie again that very night.

Maybe starting it after 10 p.m. wasn't such a good idea, but I figured, I'd already seen it once, and the characters were fresh in my memory from the page. Fatigue would not be the same factor as if I were sitting through it the first time, with the same lack of bearings I had ten years ago.

I don't think the time of night was really the issue, but I didn't like the movie much better.

Here are the reasons why:

1) The impression of the film's excessive talkiness was still with me. In trying to streamline what is also considered to be a confusing book, the trio of screenwriters (who include William Faulkner) had removed some of the intervening scenes, scenes where Marlowe is alone with his thoughts and with a drink. Because much of his ruminating does, indeed, never escape his thoughts, in the movie he's left having to convey the same discoveries about the case via dialogue with another character. And since there is a lot of information to convey, there are a lot of characters he has to burden with a lot of exposition about the story, with few down scenes to breathe in between.

The next several will be changes from the book that were probably necessary to make a bleak novel more palatable to a wider movie audience. In other words, changes dictated by Hollywood. Some SPOILERS to follow. 

2) The character who is never seen but who drives much of the action is named Tom Regan in the novel, Sean Regan in the film. That alone is not noteworthy, but in the novel he is the husband of the femme fatale, Vivian Regan, whereas in the film he is just unconnected from the action except in terms of being a favorite associate of Vivian's father, General Sternwood. The more intimate connection of him being the general's son-in-law and his daughter's wayward husband works much better, especially since this character is otherwise a puzzling source of obsession threading through the whole story, even the parts that seem to have nothing to do with him. I suspect this was because they wanted to make Vivian a more traditional love interest for Marlowe and the morality of that was sketchy when she's already married, albeit it to someone who has theoretically run off with another woman. (We find out that's not what happened to Tom/Sean, but for most of the story we entertain that possibility.) She does have a failed marriage in her history but she is Vivian Rutledge, not Vivian Regan. She's played by Lauren Bacall.

3) The need to give our femme fatale a lot more screen time than she gets in the book. Vivian is certainly a central character in the novel, the (slightly) more sensible of the two Sternwood daughters, but she doesn't need to pop up in every scene. I counted at least two crucial scenes in the movie where she was present, where she wasn't in the novel, and her presence doesn't really make sense in either of them. Again this has to do with making her a more traditional love interest in the movie. I believe she and Marlowe do kiss in the book, but he views it as sort of a cheeky compensation for all the head games the Sternwoods are playing with him, not love or anything approaching it. I prefer my Marlowe in the novel's more detached mode. 

4) The ending is entirely different. The big bad has to get it in the end of the movie, where he doesn't in a novel, which can have a harsher ending and leave only hollow victories for the protagonist. As such, the Eddie Mars character (played by John Ridgely) is promoted to that role of big bad, whereas he overshadows the proceedings more than anything in the book, and is still decidedly on his feet and ready to get richer at the end. That is more of a noir ending and I vastly prefer it.

5) However, if the goal were to try to make the movie tighter and cleaner, to make sure all the characters get paid off properly, that goal is also fumbled. The novel notably revisits characters we met at the beginning, such as General Sternwood, while the movie doesn't bother with it. Neither is the younger sister, Carmen Sternwood, checked in on after about the movie's halfway point. She's a key player in the final pages of the novel but is basically just discarded in the screen version. 

The big complaint I had about this movie when I saw it -- and the complaint I understand even its fans are willing to level against it -- is that the plot doesn't make any sense. I don't have that problem anymore after reading the book. I find it all connects together well enough, but I also find that the plot does not adapt well to a movie template because it's a bit more sprawling, sort of with two distinct halves that have only a thin relationship to each other. The way they tried to finesse the screenplay to give it more sense actually makes the problem worse, though it's hard for me to see that as easily now because I did just read the book and I do freshly recognize most of the scenes.

Which I guess means I just need to trust the 2013 version of myself and the experience he had. 

I think I do like the movie more now -- more than a ranking of 3,973 out of 6,423 on Flickchart, in any case. But while I thought there was a chance I'd need to re-rank it straight away to upgrade my appreciation of it, and to make more accurate the results of duels between whatever film I'm ranking and the movie that is ranked at that spot on my chart, I now think I'll let it occur organically as it is not likely to jump more than a couple hundred spots. 

The movie was better

One of the oldest adages, if you want to call it that, regarding film adaptations of popular books is that "the book was better." And even as much of a cinema loyalist as I am, I get that, and often believe it myself.

But what happens when you're only getting around to reading the book after you've seen the film SIX TIMES?

I suppose that doesn't happen all that often, although maybe it does. If you've discovered you love a movie this much, you've probably also discovered you want to consume everything there is related to it, be that books, graphic novels, soundtracks, action figures or lunch boxes.

And so it was with me and Patrick Suskind's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, whose filmed version I have seen once each in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2015, 2018, and now 2020, having watched the movie Friday night after finishing the novel last weekend. 

The existence of, and high quality of, the novel is something I have known about throughout my 13-year-love affair with this movie -- almost exactly 13 years, as my original viewing of Tom Tykwer's 2006 film was on December 7, 2007. (No, didn't get to rank it in the year of its original release, to my great regret.) In fact, when I tried to sell a friend on its virtues very early on, he snootily insisted it would be impossible to film that great novel and that he would not even deign to watch such an attempt.

It took until my family and I were on a little book-buying spree while out of town in July -- to help a local bookstore that we imagined to be suffering under the ravages of the pandemic -- that I finally picked up Suskind's novel to read myself. 

It actually took longer to read this little slip of a book than I was expecting it would. It's a scant 260 pages, but it took me more than six weeks to finish it -- which is actually reasonably fast by my previous standards, but slow by my new 2020/pandemic standards, especially when I imagined from the first 40 pages that I might gobble it up in a week's time.

The eventual delay in completing it informs what I want to write about today, which is that the longer the story went on, the more I questioned Suskind's choices in how to tell it. Which is absurd, as the book was the original object, and the film I love so much only a filmmaker's attempt to honor its spirit. But just as you see deleted scenes from a movie and feel very glad they were not in the finished product, it's possible to see an adaptation of a book and realize just how shrewd the decisions were on what to include and what to excise. And that can't help but make the book seem like a bit of a shaggy dog, replete with passages it should not have included -- even when it is only 260 pages. 

Especially when you've seen the film six times.

So today -- hoping that I can get a good structure for this -- I want to discuss the core differences between the film and the text, and why I think that in almost every instance, the film made the better choice.

If you haven't either seen the movie or read the book, consider this your SPOILER WARNING. In truth, this post is probably best suited for people who know at least one of these pretty well, though by all means, read on, even if this does not describe you.

Note: I started writing this on Saturday, and I am only just now getting around to finishing it. Part of that was feeling a bit daunted about structuring this in an effective way, as it can be difficult to parse differences between two versions of the same "text" in anything other than a list. So instead of continuing to fuss about it, I just decided to make a list.

1) The first inkling the book gave me that I might not love it was its pacing, which is very inconsistent. In this case, the complaint about pacing goes hand in hand with a complaint about perspective. I'll try to explain. The book starts out like a house on fire, racing through its opening chapters and the opening chapters of antihero Jean-Baptiste Grenouille's life. (That's Ben Whishaw in the film.) That racing I consider to be a good thing. Suskind's elegant prose has a way of weaving together the broad strokes of Grenouille's early life without getting bogged down in the details, except as they are particularly illuminating of a broader idea -- a feat duplicated by John Hurt's narration in the film. We learn what we need to learn with an economy of phrasing and a knack for linguistic cleverness, and it's an exquisite read.

That is, until we meet Giuseppe Baldini, the perfumer played in the film by Dustin Hoffman. It is here that not only does the pace screech to a halt, but it leaves Grenouille's subjectivity in order to jump inside Baldini's head for like five straight chapters. Where Suskind relies on an economy of words earlier, here he seems to luxuriate in the inner thoughts of Baldini, spending as many words on several hours of mental deliberation by Baldini as he does on the first 15 years of Grenouille's life. We get some of this in the movie -- I think the scene where he tries to ascertain the ingredients of Amor and Psyche is great -- but we are still looking at Baldini as an outsider would, as Grenouille would if he were in the room with him. 

2) Because we spend so many consecutive chapters in his head in a way that really starts to feel redundant, we learn things about Baldini that it is not necessary to learn, that indeed we never learn in the film. We learn, for example, that Baldini feels he's at the end of the road as a perfumer and is thinking of selling his shop. We also learn that he was never a great perfumer, but made his fortune on two perfumes that were essentially pilfered from others without anyone knowing. I like the film's choice in this regard, which it states openly in the narration, much better. The film version of Baldini is, in fact, a genuine talent who has lost his one-time inspiration, leaving him over the hill. I like that better as a character detail for him than someone who was always a fraud. He can still be a stuffed shirt and a bit of a fool, but he also carries the tragedy we all carry as we age, where we can no longer do what we once could. In fact, the twinkle Baldini gets in his eye when he talks about his formative days in Grasse indicates a genuine love of the art, not a conman's sense of how to profit at any cost.

3) The middle portion of the book, after Grenouille leaves Baldini to head to Grasse, really made me scratch my head. In both versions he gets diverted by following his nose to a place devoid of smells, which is a cave in a mountainous area far away from all villages. As I watched the film, I noted that we do not learn how long he stays in this cave, appreciating the lack of olfactory stimulation, only that his hair and beard grow long. I think the only reference Hurt makes to the amount of time he spends there is "a while." Judging from the hair and beard growth, it seems to be a couple months.

In the book, Grenouille stays in this cave for seven years. Let that sink in a moment. We know Grenouille is an eccentric, but the book wants us to think that he is such an eccentric that he will literally hide in a cave for the better part of a decade, spending all his time perusing a mental library of the smells he has shelved away there. The book talks about how he survives by eating grubs and dead bats and the like. This goes on for seven years. Obviously, Tom Tykwer and his fellow screenwriters, Andrew Birkin and Bernd Eichinger, thought this was a ridiculous duration of time. Especially when Grenouille had had, up until recently, a burning passion to reach Grasse in order to learn what Baldini calls "the mysterious art of enfleurage," which he intends to use to capture the smell of living beings. (Make that, recently living beings.) Even someone as eccentric as Grenouille couldn't get distracted from that goal for more than a couple months.

4) When Grenouille returns to society in the book, he's so outlandish looking that he has to come up with a story to explain his appearance. He explains that he was kidnapped by bandits and imprisoned in the cave for seven years, fed by an unseen sympathetic person. He comes into contact with a marquis in the city of Montpelier, who has a theory about the impact of "fluidal energies" on human vitality, using Grenouille as his prime example of the theory. During this time Grenouille concocts a "normal human" scent for himself to wear as a perfume to convince people he is human, and not someone they should overlook due to his innate lack of scent. He becomes further disdainful toward people before finally moving along to Grasse.

None of this occurs in the film, including the entire character of the marquis. If Tykwer et al didn't think he could be distracted from Grasse for seven years, they certainly also didn't think he would make this needless diversion to Montpelier. They are right, of course.

5) The rest of the narrative more or less lines up, but I did think there was an important difference to how the end of the movie plays out that seems purely the creation of Tykwer and his collaborators. In both versions Grenouille works on a perfume that will combine the smells of multiple virginal young women, to create a scent so powerful he can make people instantly fall in love with him with just a drop of it. The movie, though, has technical details of this process that the book does not. Tykwer and company introduce the notion of the three parts of a perfume, the head, the heart and the base, which each have their own lengths of time after the perfumed is applied that they can still be perceived. Baldini explains this to Grenouille in the film but not the book. Baldini also talks about 12 individual chords that comprise the perfume, plus a 13th that rings out and dominates all the others. This becomes the basis for Grenouille setting up 13 little stoppered perfume vials that he eventually fills with the scents he extracts and distills from the women.

It's hard to believe that what seems like such a crucial part of the film's third act is entirely an invention of the film. This is not to say it is not based in scientific reality; I have no idea if it is or not. But it works dramatically, while also keeping us inside Grenouille's head for his entire spree killing the young women of Grasse, as this great montage of murder comes complete with shots of the vials being steadily filled, one by one. In the book, Suskind makes the curious decision not only not to talk very much about Grenouille's method, but to actually step away from his subjectivity entirely, as the murders are discussed almost as though a disinterested third party, a news reporter perhaps, is presenting them to us -- almost as though just as ignorant of the murderer's identity as the people of Grasse are.

6) Similarly, the film lays the groundwork for the possible power of the perfume Grenouille creates through a story from Baldini, which he calls a legend. He talks about the opening of a pharaoh's tomb, revealing a scent so ancient and so beautiful that "for one single moment, every person on earth thought they were in paradise." It's only because we are told about this at the beginning of the film that we believe the people's reaction to such a scent at the end. The book does not include this story either.

7) There is also a crucial difference between how the book perceives Grenouille and how the movie perceives him. The book considers Grenouille to be an intentional psychopath, the movie an accidental one. While this may be a concession to a film's greater need for audience sympathy for its characters, I also think it works better. In the book, Grenouille intentionally strangles the fruit seller in Paris as a means of possessing her scent. In the film, he covers her mouth after she cries out, not wanting to attract the attention of a couple young lovers descending the stairs nearby. He's such an id and so unacquainted with empathy that he does not realize he's suffocating the girl until she's already dead, and is at first horrified by what he's done. No such complex emotions exist in the book.

The film doubles back on this in a way that I also find very effective. In Grenouille's climactic moment of triumph, when he has enslaved the people of Grasse and reduced them into an orgy of carnal chaos, he can't live in that moment of victory because the sexual activity reminds him of his first sense of love or lust for the fruit seller. He becomes overwhelmed by melancholy and in that moment realizes that the entire direction of his life has been a mistake. He imagines the fruit seller welcoming his attentions and them entwined in a tender romantic interaction. We seem to know, in that moment, that he realizes that the other way to possess a scent is to love the bearer of that scent, and to earn her love in return.

8) Grenouille has a melancholy epiphany of sorts in the book as well, but nothing about the forgotten fruit seller is suggested. In fact, I can't remember if anything about Grenouille's interior life is suggested in that scene at all. The scene reaches its climax when Antoine Richis (Alan Rickman in the film) pushes through the orgy to try to attack Grenouille, ultimately succumbing to the same overwhelming feelings of love as the other characters, even though he has the greatest reason to hate Grenouille.  Grenouille killed his daughter -- Laure (in the book), Laura (in the film, where she is played by Rachel Hurd-Wood) -- yet he is powerless to exact revenge. This is the same in both the film and the book, and when Richis begs for forgiveness in the film, he calls Grenouille "my son." In the book, though, Grenouille faints, only to awaken later in a bed at Richis' house. Here, Richis proposes in a more literal fashion that he would like to serve as a father to Grenouille.

There are a couple reasons this doesn't work for me. First, "my son" is all you really need -- anything else puts too fine a point on it. The bigger problem, though, is that Richis' affection for him extends beyond an indefinite period of unconsciousness by Grenouille, as well as a change of location. I much prefer the scent, even as powerful as it is, to be a temporary spell cast over those who smell it, and when they awaken from it -- as the Grasse citizens do after their orgy -- they are mystified by the power it had over them. I also prefer Grenouille maintaining his upper hand in that scene, walking out of the city of Grasse under his own power, rather than having to be nursed, however temporarily, at Richis' house.

I know this is getting quite long but I have to mention a few other smaller things:

9) In the film, we are introduced to a teenage boy and girl in Grasse, who flirt in the fields and then have an abortive sexual encounter in a barn. At first, when I was watching the film, I forgot what their plot function was. It turns out she's Grenouille's first victim, and I think it's useful to introduce her to us, however briefly, as a way of setting the stakes. We don't meet any of Grenouille's other victims in the book.

10) Perhaps needing a scene of tension that is uniquely cinematic, Tykwer et al created a set piece related to this girl that is also not in the book. Before he has mastered his technique about how to distill the smells of these girls, he puts this girl's whole body in a big tank of water that is meant to boil down the essence of things like flowers. During this experiment he is nearly discovered by another townswoman as well as the woman who employs him and her brutish assistant. The tension in the scene works, and it has no antecedent in the novel.

11) The film also has a scene of hide and seek in a hedge maze, that recalls similar scenes from both Bram Stoker's Dracula and The Shining. This is also in the interest of dramatizing the disappearance of some of Grenouille's other victims, in this case a pair of sisters in one fell swoop. It may not be strictly necessary, but it helps establish the opulence of upper class society in Grasse. Again, not in the book.

12) I'll mention one last difference between the book and the film that comes from going into another character's subjectivity, when it would be much better off staying with Grenouille. In the book, we learn more than we do in the film about Richis, Laure/Laura's father. We learn more about his industry, his wealth -- and his feelings about his daughter. In fact, we learn that he shares an inclination toward incest with Donald Trump, as the novel discusses the woozy feeling he sometimes gets in the presence of his daughter, and his actual wish that he were just another man rather than her father so he could be her lover. As with Baldini, I don't know why we need to undercut this man in this way. It seems preferable that Richis is just a proper, God-fearing man who tries to do right by his daughter by going to great lengths to protect her from a murderer -- and despite doing everything right, still loses her. 

I should close by saying that my reaction to the novel was something I could have easily predicted. I have a theory that the first version of something you consume is the version you like best, which I most often apply to songs. If you hear the original first and fall in love with it, the remix doesn't stand a chance, but if it's the remix you hear first, the original won't hold a candle to it.

But so it is also with books and movies. I remember listening to the audio book of The Hunger Games back when I had about a 45-minute commute in Los Angeles traffic to and from work. This was after I had seen the film -- twice, I think. And I had the same reaction. There were parts of the book that the filmmakers left on the cutting room floor, or never filmed in the first place. And almost without exception those seemed like the right choices to me.

It'll never be possible to test this sort of thing, as it's not possible to un-read or un-see something in order to recreate an experience of consuming the other first. But I do think you can say, without too much bias, that a certain section of a book really didn't do anything for the book, like the part where Grenouille goes to Montpelier before he gets to Grasse. I'd like to think that even as I was reading that, had I been reading it first, I would have been able to look back after I finished and determined that it was not an essential passage.

Which is what Tom Tykwer and company decided as they were adapting it, which is why they are very smart men. 

In the final analysis, I regret that this post will have the effect of casting aspersions of Patrick Suskind's novel. It's a wickedly entertaining novel and I very much enjoyed reading it. It's just the movie set such high expectations that I was never going to be able to enjoy it as much as I wanted to enjoy it, which is why I couldn't sustain the fast pace I started out with. 

What can you say? Sometimes the movie really is better. Or, at the very least, just so damn good that it blinds you to any strengths of the source material that may have the audacity to differ from the way it was adapted for the screen. 

Pandemic reading list adaptation weekend, with butling by Pip Torrens

I didn't have a pandemic reading list per se, but when I worried I was piddling away my quarantine on comic books (Watchmen) and weirdly sex-obsessed Philip Roth novels (Sabbath's Theater), I started to kind of formulate one.

I followed Sabbath's Theater with a much-needed dip into the classics with Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ordinarily I don't go with two classics in a row, but circumstance pushed me to Jane Austen as next on my to-read list, with her classic, Pride and Prejudice. (And, as an English major, it shames me to say it was the first Austen I had ever read.)

The "circumstance" in question was that I drew Joe Wright's 2005 adaptation of Austen's most famous novel as my latest monthly selection in Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta. It's a Facebook group that is associated with the Flickchart movie-dueling website, and each month, you are randomly assigned the highest ranked movie on another person's Flickchart that you haven't yet seen.

Because that's the way I roll, I am very particular about completing the viewing within the month it is assigned. I can only remember two instances of missing my deadline, and in both cases, it was that I couldn't source the movie by the end of the month it was assigned, but did so within the first few days of the new month.

Pride and Prejudice presented me a slightly different obstacle. Although I've seen the Bollywood variation on the novel, Bride and Prejudice, as well as the genre mashup Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I had never yet seen a straightforward adaptation of the book, and therefore, knew only vague things about the plot. I knew that there was some guy named Mr. Darcy and I knew that he ended up with the heroine, but beyond that, it was pretty foreign to me. Which, I suppose, says something about the two cinematic variations listed above.

Upon having the movie assigned to me, I was suddenly struck by the certainty that this was my last, best chance to actually read the book, assuming I wanted to read it before watching and didn't want to forfeit my assignment. So on the last Sunday before the month began, I went to my local bookseller and scooped it up.

Simply put, I loved it. I gobbled it up in pretty much record time for a 367-page novel -- at my slow reading pace, I mean -- which was 25 days. I finished this past Thursday.

So I always knew I was going to watch Pride and Prejudice -- or, properly, Pride & Prejudice, with the ampersand favored by Wright -- this weekend. That viewing ended up landing on Sunday morning. What I didn't know, couldn't have known, was that I would also watch an adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray on Friday night.

Yet I found myself in that circumstance while flipping through the options on Stan. After going through pages and pages of "trending" movies, nine out of every ten of which I'd seen, I landed on Oliver Parker's 2009 adaptation of his namesake's only novel, called simply Dorian Gray. At the time, the future connection with Pride & Prejudice didn't even occur to me. I just knew it would be interesting to see a recent adaptation of this book fresh off the reading of it, even though I was vaguely wary that the movie wasn't really on my radar in 2009, despite it being a period of great cinematic sentience for me in general.

I should say, I also loved The Picture of Dorian Gray. I did not love Dorian Gray, but there were things I admired about it quite a bit. For one, it had a very "wax stamp" type of production design -- that's the umbrella term I use for any movie that either has, or could have, a letter sealed with a wax stamp. The "wax stamp" here was a close-up of the acrylic paint as the artist squeezes it out and dabs it on the canvas.

The adaptation was generally faithful, with a few things changed for narrative convenience. I liked the actor chosen to portray the title character, Ben Barnes, whose name is familiar to me, but I couldn't immediately place him. (Ah, yes, he's in Westworld.) He's got an appearance suited to the role, seeming quite innocent and beautiful, but then quite believably being able to be corrupted into evil.

In the second half, the combining of characters and circumstances becomes a bit more unbalanced, and things become a lot more overheated, so it kind of heads toward a pulpy, effects-laden finale. I shouldn't criticize the effects, though, because I must admit, one of the bits of great interest to me was how sinister they would make the aging painting at the film's center. Ultimately, it's not a huge surprise this wasn't something I considered in 2009 when formulating my year-end list, as it isn't that worthy of an effort in the end. Still enjoyable, but just not quite there.

The comparatively pedestrian look of Dorian Gray was drawn into sharp relief when I got to Pride & Prejudice on Sunday morning. That movie was about a painting, but this one looks like one. I was in awe of Wright's compositions and the way Roman Osin photographs them. I was reminded also that Wright is the man behind the extended Dunkirk beach single take in Atonement. I hadn't expected much cinematic derring do going in, but Wright gives us a breathtaking single shot in this film in which the camera weaves through a busy ball, catching all manner of characters in the midst of all manner of interactions, and frequently, the same characters a different time, interacting with different characters. I positively gaped at that one.

It was really useful to have just read the book, though Deborah Moggach's script is so clear and concise that I mightn't have needed it anyway. In fact, near the start of the book I found my head spinning a bit at the number of characters introduced, and though Moggach and Wright introduce them all here as well, I feel quite certain that on the evidence of the script alone I would have kept them straight in this case.

I've written too much about other things to turn this into the full-on Pride & Prejudice gush-fest I want to give you, but I can't depart without discussing the performances. Keira Knightley is wonderful in this film, a true revelation. Such a stellar cast: Donald Sutherland, Brenda Blethyn, Rosamund Pike, Tom Hollander, Judi Densch, Jena Malone and Carey Mulligan -- the last before anyone had heard of her, I think. If I first saw Pike in this rather than one of her later roles, I wouldn't probably have started out thinking she had dead eyes, which is something I wrote about back in this post. As for Matthew MacFadyen as Mr. Darcy ... he didn't look at all as I imagined him while reading, but he's very definitely convincing as a person who doesn't start out very charming. As Elizabeth Bennet grows to love him, I sort of did too.

But I can't take off, either, without explaining what the hell I meant by the second half of the subject of this post. "Butling by Pip Torrens"?

This is a good one.

When I started watching Dorian Gray, I instantly recognized Pip Torrens as the title character's butler/footman/what have you. Not by name, but by role. Before I looked up his name, I knew Torrens played the queen's secretary on The Crown, Tommy Lascelles. Here he is:

The same qualities that make him a logical choice to play Tommy Lascelles also make him a logical choice to play butlers.

You'll notice I said "butlers," plural. Because lo and behold, who should be waiting on the well-to-do in Pride & Prejudice, as well? That's right, good ol' Pip Torrens -- possibly only in one scene, but I saw him. I caught that distinctive mug, confirmed it online, and laughed my fool head off.

There's one more coincidence between the two movies that's worth pointing out, especially on a blog that likes coincidences as much as this one does. An actor I haven't mentioned in Dorian Gray -- well, I only mentioned one in the first place -- is Colin Firth as Henry Wotton, the libertine who sets Dorian on his path to ruin. Firth does fit what I imagined for that role, and he classes up the joint whenever he's on screen. (As does Rebecca Hall, I should say.)

The reason that's funny is that Firth is known to BBC audiences for one of the earliest roles that thrust him into the spotlight: A one Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy in the 1995 television minseries version of Pride and Prejudice.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Watching Watchmen, watching Watchmen, watching Watchmen, reading Watchmen, watching Watchmen

Alan Moore's Watchmen comic series (illustrated by Dave Gibbons) was released as 12 issues in 1986 and 1987, before being collected in its more familiar form as a graphic novel, whose cover you see here to your right. It was fairly immediately hailed as one of the greatest accomplishments in comic book history, and is still thought of as such today.

I didn't read it until COVID-19 quarantine, finishing earlier this week. Which was after I'd already seen Zack Snyder's film version, which I love, three times, most recently back in 2017. (The first two were both within six months of its release.)

What finally prompted me to get this from the library -- and I'll have it out until at least May 18th, as they keeping changing the due date in expectation of a long-term closure of the library system -- was my wife and my intention to watch the popular Watchmen TV series from last year. The friend who first told me about Watchmen loves that series, a reaction he shares with many others of course, but he suggested that it was a sequel to the graphic novel, not the movie.

A subtle distinction, I figured, but there are some small differences between the two versions, which he'd already summarized for me years ago. And if he felt it was worth recognizing the distinction between the two in terms of my preparedness for the TV show, I figured it was time to finally correct this oversight in my comic-reading history and read the graphic novel. (In truth, there are many oversights in my comic-reading history, as I have not read many comic books at all in my day.)

I thought the idea would be to have the graphic novel be the version that was most recently in my head when I watched the TV show, but the truth of the matter was, reading it so whetted my appetite for another viewing of Snyder's movie that I had to program it for the very first weekend night after I finished reading. (We just started a four-day Easter weekend last night, not that weekends mean all that much right now in terms of our mobility.)

In only two years and eight months since my last viewing, somehow I'd already forgotten that my only option on my Watchmen BluRay was to watch the full three-hour director's cut. Looking back to the last time I wrote about it in 2017, that was apparently my experience then as well. Well, as I wrote then, it didn't bother me as a) Snyder was still a good director in 2009, and b) the extra scenes did not stick out like sore thumbs. Anyway, I didn't finish until 1:15 a.m., so good thing for that long recovery weekend.

Actually, the director's cut this time was instructive as it allowed me to see even more scenes from the graphic novel, some of which I knew had been cut to make the original theatrical release at least marginally digestible by a mainstream audience. In fact, as far as I could tell, almost the entirety of the first two hours was untouched, with only a few later gestures here and there to things like the death of Hollis Mason (Stephen McHattie), the man who preceded Dan Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson) as Nite Owl. I'm also pretty sure the original theatrical release contained no passing shots of the character reading the in-comic pirate comic Tales of the Black Freighter, an annoyingly disproportionate section of the graphic novel.

As sometimes happens when you consume the source material after you've already consumed the cinematic adaptation, reading Watchmen was a good opportunity to marvel at the skills of the adapter. As it turns out, writers David Hayter and Alex Tse had a really good sense of what parts of Watchmen would not translate into a movie version. The pirate comic is a good example of that. For, I assume, purely world-building and atmospheric reasons, Moore intersperses scenes of this pirate comic with action that is actually taking place, mostly around this newsstand that is a regular spot for us to experience the lives of regular people -- dispiritingly regular people, with all their crassness, self-interest and casual bigotry. It makes for difficult reading as the panels frequently feature the pirate comic character's internal monologue, as well as the conversation among characters at the newsstand, so you have to read the narratives in parallel. Since the pirate comic ultimately had little payoff for me, I can see why it was never included in the theatrical version and only appears in the director's cut as a kind of Easter egg for fans of the graphic novel. (As to why it was included in the graphic novel at all, my friend argues that it's part of fleshing out this world -- in a world where superheroes are a part of mainstream society, you would not read comic books about superheroes, but maybe, pirates.)

Another benefit of reading the graphic novel was to appreciate the talents of the casting director. Patrick Wilson, an actor I have come to adore after not thinking much of him when I first met him, is like perfect physical embodiment of Dan Dreiberg, though of course he had to put on a few pounds to look like a middle-aged schlub, or at least the Hollywood movie version thereof. Similarly great casting choices were made with Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Eddie Blake/The Comedian and Jackie Earle Haley as Walter Kovacs/Rorschach. I have frequently described Haley as my favorite part of the movie, and that's probably still true. Actually, I don't think there's a bad casting choice in the bunch, though my friend was a bit down on Malin Akerman as Laurie Jupiter. I disagree with that. Though, as with Wilson, I started out lukewarm on Akerman when I was first introduced to her, I've really come around on her. You should watch her in Wanderlust, if you haven't. Even Matthew Goode, who my friend also dislikes as Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias, works for me as I think the character is supposed to be a bit of a cipher, and Goode really communicates that. Just so we're sure to cover off all the main characters, I should say that Billy Crudup as Jon Osterman/Dr. Manhattan is a cipher in a different way as a post-human all-powerful being, and perfect in the role.

I enjoyed reading Watchmen quite a bit, but because I knew the story and because this adaptation is quite faithful to that in general, at times I was impatient for it to move along faster. I ended up reading it in less than three weeks, so that's pretty quick, especially by my standards. But maybe it felt like a long time to read a comic book. You can tell I don't have a lot of experience with this.

I did think it was worth commenting on the big difference between the book and the novel, which is the attack on New York that ends the novel and ends up purging the threat of impending nuclear war from this world. I had always known it as the equivalent of a nuclear blast, only with Dr. Manhattan's energy signature so the world could blame him for the calamity, and unite against him as a common enemy. In the comic, though, it's weirder -- or seems weirder to me, anyway, given that I've lived with the other version for 11 years. In the comic, Ozymandias causes a giant tentacled alien to materialize in the middle of the city, as though the common enemy the world needs to unite against is an alien species invading Earth. This was the difference my friend presented me with years ago, though I didn't remember the specifics until reading.

Even though he was initially down on the movie version (he's since decided he's quite fond of it), he had always described the movie's ending as possibly better, given that it gives a reason for Manhattan to exile himself from Earth. In the comic version, he's not intrinsically linked to the supposed alien invasion, so his "fatal flaw" of being an all-powerful being who has lost his sense of human empathy does not figure into the climax the way it should. The movie gets that right. The movie gets a lot of things right.

Do I have any more takeaways or is it time to let you get on with your day?

I guess the one final thing I should mention is that the graphic novel includes pieces of first-hand source material that helps build out the world, like excerpts from Hollis Mason's autobiography, memos to and from Veidt about his toy line and other various commercial enterprises, newspaper interviews with Sally Jupiter (Laurie's mother), even part of a novel about owls written by Dan Dreiberg. At first I thought I was going to be annoyed to wade through these in order to get to the next comic book material, but I enjoyed them without exception, particularly as they are relatively brief, usually about four pages each.

Okay, so I guess now it's on to tackle the TV show. How soon, though, I'm not certain.

We do have access to it as it is available to purchase directly through our TV, so it couldn't be easier. The difficulty lies in our collective motivation.

See, as I mentioned at the top, I prepared for watching the TV show by reading this graphic novel. But so did my wife. And she was not, is not, as favorably disposed toward the property as I am.

She actually watched the movie with me during my second viewing back in 2009, though she does not remember that. But she heard the TV show was great, and as TV is a bit more her medium nowadays than movies, she was eager to get up to speed in order to watch it.

Unfortunately, she found the novel unremittingly dark, feeling particularly disturbed by Rorschach's at times right-wing perspective on the world. I mean yes, the novel is supposed to be unremittingly dark, but I guess she found it a bit misogynist, which is the bigger problem. And yes, it's true, Moore probably does not portray the female characters -- there are really only four -- in a particularly flattering light. Laurie Jupiter is a bit of a mixed bag I feel, but her mother, Sally, does come across as quite crass and unredeemable, even as the victim of an attempted rape by the Comedian. Janey Slater, Jon Osterman's original girlfriend, is portrayed as a bit vindictive (even considering that she thinks she got cancer from him), and even the psychiatrist's wife, a character who does not appear in the film, is a bit of a nag in that she tries to forbid him from helping the mentally disturbed people he's tasked with helping and focus more time on her.

Here, I think, is something that Snyder et al get right. Although Snyder is thought of as a bit of a low-level misogynist himself -- whether that's deserving or not -- he benefits from the 20-year span between publishing the comics and releasing the movie to have become more woke. The movie portrayal of all the female characters seems a bit more charitable, without sanding off their rough edges that firmly entrench them as part of this misanthropic and dyspeptic world. I no longer think you can say, if you ever could, that Synder is a misogynist just because he chooses to show Akerman's breasts in her sex scene aboard the airship Archimedes. I feel like this is a decently complex portrayal, at least when compared to the source material.

But that source material -- since she has no memory of the movie -- may have put my wife off of the upcoming TV series a bit. We'll have to see how it goes.

Me? I want to see how they picked up the pieces of this world and went forward, especially since everyone says the show does such a good job of continuing the material's world view. It's already a world I knew I loved, not because it was lovable, but because there was something honest about the way it peers into the dark soul of humanity.

Now I feel like I know that world even better, and am ready for more.

Is the better story always the better movie?

Bill Bryson has been around long enough that it's surprising it's taken this long for his work to appear as a movie. And lucky him, the first time it does, he appears as a character in it.

It's sort of a strange Bryson story to be adapted, though, for a reason I'll tell you in just a minute.

But first ... even though A Walk in the Woods is not the type of movie where you'd usually issue a spoiler warning, I'm going to do so anyway, out of a general courtesy to both you and to Mr. Bryson (who has given me the pleasure of reading two of his stories, A Short History of Nearly Everything and Down Under).

It's certainly a less strange story to adapt than, say, the aforementioned A Short History of Nearly Everything, which delves into nothing less than the creation of the planet Earth and its subsequent millions of millennia of geological, ecological and cultural development. A Walk in the Woods is a story of two old codgers -- aged about 30 years so that Robert Redford, who optioned the material back in the 20th century, could play one of them -- trying to walk the entire 2,200-mile Appalachian Trial, so it does have a certain cinematic quality that makes it logical for adaptation. It was written in 1998.

The reason it's a strange story to adapt is because they don't make it. In fact, they don't even make it halfway.

Spoiler alert! Wait, I already said that.

What I'm trying to determine today is whether the fact that they didn't make it makes it a better or worse movie.

It would certainly have been a better story if Bryson and his hiking companion, Stephen Katz (Nick Nolte), had made it all the way. But would it have been a better movie?

I'm leaning towards "no," but with reservations.

The only reason we're even having this conversation in the first place, though, is that usually, the story wouldn't even get adapted unless they did make it.

Bryson is a travel writer, which kind of means that he writes about his experiences whether anything actually happens or not. I haven't read A Walk in the Woods, but ultimately, the conclusion is kind of that "nothing" is what actually happened. Oh sure, they were beset by small adventures, the types of things you would definitely recount to your wife or to a friend once you returned from the trip. But nothing really happened that in and of itself would have made a great story, assuming that Rick Kerb and Bill Holderman's script does hew fairly closely to the actual details of the story. (I'll pause to acknowledge a few ways that it notably does not, however. As Bryson is only just now 63 years old, that means he wrote it when he was 46, a full 33 years younger than Redford is right now. Then there's the uncertainty of what time period the film exists in, exemplified by Kristen Schaal's character singing the Pharrell/Daft Punk song "Get Lucky" from 2013, but also by the contradicting fact that no one in the film uses a cell phone, when that kind of thing would obviously benefit someone hiking the Appalachian Trail.)

So obviously, Redford's reasons for optioning it had to do with trying to say something about testing personal limits, getting out of comfort zones, and reacquainting with long-lost friends, which are all themes of the film that resulted. (What's more, he envisioned this as his third film with Paul Newman, but Newman was too sick to make the film and died in 2008.) Those are perhaps better things to give us in a film than the standard "overcoming steep odds to prove everybody wrong" story, which has been done a million times and has basically ceased to be interesting.

The thing is, the only reason most stories are worth telling in the first place is because somebody overcame steep odds and because somebody proved everybody wrong. Otherwise, no one would have even recorded the story for posterity.

Because Bryson recorded everything he did for posterity as part of his job description, and thrived through his gift for spinning entertaining reading out of potentially banal activities, the conditions were created where Redford could adapt a story in which people failed at what they set out to do, and in which nothing very earth-shattering happened in the process of them failing.

Unless you consider the minute appreciations gained of life's fragility and the durability of friendship to be earth-shattering, and in the hands of a good writer, I suppose they are.

Not a time for muted emotions

This poster may be the most emotionally strident thing about Andrea Arnold's 2011 adaptation of Wuthering Heights.

And that's a problem for a film version of perhaps the most romantic novel ever written.

My love affair with Emily Bronte's novel goes back years, though to this day I have only read it the one time. I first encountered it in an English class my freshman year of high school, but not as a text. A classmate had written about the book, or perhaps more accurately, about Kate Bush's song "Wuthering Heights," which was inspired by it. And since our teacher was having us present our papers to the class, she played the song to us. "Heathcliff ... it's me, Cathy, I've come home ... I'm so cold, let me into your window." I didn't know who Heathcliff and Cathy were at the time, but something about Bush's passion as she sang stuck with me.

Perhaps this helped ensnare me in the book's spell when I finally read Wuthering Heights my junior year in college. In a class devoted to the Victorian novel that also featured favorites like Middlemarch and New Grub Street, Wuthering Heights had a special kind of influence on me because it tugged at the romantic inside me like these other books may not have. I read it 20 years ago, but it has remained with me, made itself a part of my person.

And so I have sought out film versions of Wuthering Heights, first the classic 1939 version directed by William Wyler, then about seven years ago, Peter Kosminsky's 1992 version. Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon were the star-crossed lovers in the former, Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche in the latter. Both delivered, in their own ways, on the promise of the novel's exquisite emotional angst.

Andrea Arnold's version, unfortunately, did not.

Arnold's version of the story, which relies heavily on handheld camera, is clearly intended to be a modern version, even though the time period of the original novel is preserved. It's also intended as a minimalist version of the story, as the dialogue is sparse, and many developments in the plot must be inferred based on limited information. If this is your first Wuthering Heights, you will be lost.

However, I can see how the choices Arnold made -- including using a cast of non-professional actors -- might seem to invigorate the material, though I'd dispute its need for invigoration. It does feel modern, in some of the right ways.

But by eschewing most of the exposition as well as most of the declarations of love between Catherine Earnshaw and her beloved Heathcliff, Arnold leaves us with something that feels emotionally minimal as well.

Strangely, though, this may actually be the most technically beautiful iteration of the story in existence. If Terrence Malick saw this movie, he probably left the theater jealous that he wasn't the one who made it. The book's infamous setting on the moors in the north of England has never looked so damp, so fecund, so positively twinkling with dew and beauty. Nearly every scene is established with glistening branches racking in or out of focus, grass blowing, leaves twisting, fog rolling. It's quite simply some of the most gorgeous camera work I've ever seen ... and sadly, it's in the service of something regrettably limp.

Who should we blame? Arnold clearly knows how to make a dramatically resonant movie. Just watch Fish Tank if you are unsure of that. And all those inserts of nature would have really popped if they'd been buttressed by a sense of epic doomed love.

So I suppose it's the actors who aren't quite up to the task. Solomon Glave and Shannon Beer play Heathcliff and Catherine as kids, then James Howson and Kaya Scodelario step into the roles later on. I suppose it's a good time, now that I am mentioning the cast, to mention that this version has chosen a black actor to play Heathcliff, while he is described in Bronte's book merely as a "dark-skinned gypsy in aspect." This is a really good decision, and contributes to the film's modernity. Unfortunately, neither Glave nor Howson can give Heathcliff that burning, feral quality that makes him one of literature's great antiheroes.

There are individual intimate moments between the characters that hint at something greater that's consuming them. But the movie has chosen to leave the richer moments off screen, alluded to but never actually dramatized. In her attempt not to contribute to the existing number of florid, emotionally purple versions of Wuthering Heights, Arnold has committed the opposite sin of failing to establish the stakes. We have to believe that these characters yearn for each other at an elemental level that's equivalent to the mud and grass of those gorgeous moors, as captured by Robbie Ryan's lens. But we never do, because some number of actual words are needed to communicate this to us.

I will admit it's possible my appreciation for this movie was negatively impacted by the fact that I watched it over the course of three evenings. I was taken down by sleep after 45 minutes the first night, and after only 30 more on the second night. I polished off the last 45 tonight. I am the first to admit this is no way to watch a movie.

Then again, if Arnold did a better job of sweeping me up, she would have had me in one go.

You know, like Kate Bush did in that high school classroom back in 1987, and Emily Bronte did in that college lecture hall in 1994.

My wife made a good point about why she wasn't that interested in watching this new one with me, which also explains why the other two film versions I've seen haven't gotten very close to my love of the book. "In the book it's this great love affair, but in the movies it's just people staring forlornly out at the moors, and that doesn't translate."

Yep, there are times when a love is so passionate, so grandiose, so tragic, that only our minds are sufficient venues in which to consider it. Commit it to film, render it specific in some unavoidable way, and it is doomed to come up short.

Just as doomed as Heathcliff and his beloved Catherine.

Reversing the normal order

With books that get made into movies, I usually do one of two things: 1) Read the book and then see the movie; 2) See the movie and never read the book. (I suppose there are also plenty of situations where I do neither.)

Not so with The Hunger Games. I'm sure this has happened before, but not in a long while: I saw the movie and then circled back to read the book. I suppose I should say, to "read" the book -- I listened to the unabridged audio book, which is the same as reading it in terms of the processing your brain does.

I hadn't planned to do that. In fact, my original plan had been to try to read the novel before seeing the movie, as discussed here. When that plan didn't pan out, I assumed there was no more "plan" related to The Hunger Games at all.

But in early December, I was at the library looking for the next audio book for my commute, and came across Suzanne Collins' novel. Even then I might not have selected it, but I had my son with me, and he was being particularly squirmy. So I just grabbed it and went, deciding at the very least that it would make an interesting experiment in order reversal. With an audio book, which has the benefit of being a more passive experience than sitting down to read, you can afford to take gambles on reading experiences. Which is just one reason I've been enjoying the audio book phase of my life over the past six months since we moved 25 miles from my office. I may even "read" some harlequin romance just to see how bad it really is.

I could write this post just about what I gleaned from my experience of this story by reversing the order, but I added an extra layer to the venture by watching the movie again this past weekend. My wife hadn't seen it, and had it on her list of movies she wanted to watch around Christmastime (most of which I had already seen). I probably would have been interested in seeing The Hunger Games again anyway, but having just read the book gave me extra incentive.

Let's just say that the movie, which came out early in the year and has been steadily inching down my list, immediately shot up a dozen spots upon second viewing. And having read the book in between definitely made me appreciate how good a movie it actually is.  

SPOILER ALERT: I will probably spoil aspects of the plot as we continue. So if you have somehow still neither read the book nor seen the movie, you may choose to bail at this point.

For starters, let me say that I loved the book -- to a point. I found that the first two-thirds of it raced along, and Collins' prose manages to be both direct and evocative at the same time. I got more insight on some parts of the movie I initially thought were underdeveloped, and I really enjoyed having unfettered access to Katniss Everdeen's thoughts. In case you haven't read the book, it's told entirely from her perspective. We hear what she's thinking at every moment, and we know only what she knows.

But the final third of the book dragged for me. This may have been where knowing how it ends really affected my enjoyment. In either scenario of consuming a story for the second time -- whether as a film or as a book -- you're often looking forward to when such-and-such happens, to how they chose to depict such-and-such. However, that wait can seem interminable in text form. A quick analysis of the pace of the story's events and the number of discs remaining told me that the book was going to spend a lot of time in the arena, whereas the film's action is a bit more front-loaded. And I quickly realized that the movie's front-loading was to its advantage.

Simply put, there's way too much of the book where Katniss and Peeta are "playing house" in the arena. We're down to just a few tributes remaining, and the announcement has already been made that this year's rules are changing to allow two winners, as long as they both come from the same district. At this point, the novel pretty much grinds to a halt. The danger seems to disappear, and Katniss and Peeta have literally days upon days of hunting, gathering, treating Peeta's wounds and falling in love (though Katniss does not recognize it as such, thinking instead that it's part of their game strategy).

And here we truly see the novel's status as a product for young adults. It's called a YA novel, but really, that means teens. And teens want to know all the ins and outs of how people their own age fall in love. It's the thing that preoccupies them the most, and one can't blame Collins for lingering on that aspect of the story for longer than most regular adults could possibly stand. To be clear, she never loses focus on the overall thrust of the story, but she indulges in the star-crossed blossoming love between Katniss and Peeta more than one would think she needed to.

Apparently, she didn't think she needed to dwell here, either, once the novel became a movie. As one of the three credited screenwriters on the movie, Collins leaves much more unsaid about what develops between Peeta and Katniss. Whereas they kiss probably a dozen times in the book, a movie can afford to be a lot more subtle, can choose individual moments and give them greater significance. It has to, because a movie is essentially an efficient form of storytelling, while novels are generally more flabby. So in the movie, Katniss and Peeta share only a single kiss -- two at most. Which is just as it should be. And a bone is definitely thrown to the adults who will help make the movie a hit, as a couple time-lapse sundowns and sunups show the passage of their time together that the novel explicates in exhausting detail.

The most important other difference between the novel and the movie is the viewer's perspective on the events. As I said, the novel is told entirely from Katniss' perspective. We meet and understand characters only as she meets and understands them. Characters she does not meet are really not characters at all. Which creates a strange kind of void in the book, especially when you've already seen the movie. The only character who personifies an antagonist is probably Cato, the District 2 "career tribute" who is widely viewed as the arena's alpha male. Katniss never meets the Gamemaker Seneca Crane (played in the movie by Wes Bentley) nor President Coriolanus Snow (played in the movie by Donald Sutherland), although Snow is referred to. So for the people who have only seen the movie, the two faces they most associate with the nefarious Capitol don't even appear in the book. In the movie they can appear, because the perspective is omniscient.

This is a key difference. I didn't necessarily think it was to the novel's detriment that there is no personification of what Katniss is fighting -- fighting in the larger metaphorical sense, not in the literal sense of her competitors in the arena. But that never would have flown in a movie, to have just an abstract faceless villain. So while I'm not necessarily sure this is a misstep in Collins' novel, it's definitely a smart decision by the movie to make these two characters flesh and blood. Especially since Sutherland is so wonderfully chilling (which goes with his name, I suppose). His story to Crane about why there is a victor in the games is one of the movie's most telling moments, the moment that really gets us inside the mindset of a totalitarian regime fully wary of its loose grip on power.

However, the existence of Bentley's character in the movie but not the book played tricks on me. One of the main drawbacks of reading a book after you see the movie (or even after you're aware a movie exists) is that you can't help but see the characters as the actors who were cast in those roles. If you cherish the way a novel allows you to imagine how the words might look, you lose that as soon as a movie version becomes widely publicized. That had a particularly strange effect on me as I was reading the novel when it came to Bentley. I remembered that Bentley was in the movie, but apparently, not what role he played. So when Katniss' sympathetic stylist Cinna made his first appearance in the novel, my mind latched on to this character as the character Bentley must have played. So for the rest of the book, Bentley was Cinna. It was to my surprise when I watched the movie again, and Bentley's character is being interviewed by Caesar Flickerman (Stanley Tucci) at the start. When Cinna appears probably 45 minutes later, I thought "Duh -- it's Lenny Kravitz." Still, any time I'd see Bentley again, I subconsciously thought "Cinna, what are you doing creating unholy hounds from hell that are sent into the arena to kill Katniss?"

Having Snow and Crane appear as antagonists (albeit a conflicted antagonist in Crane's case) also has the effect of softening the portrayal of the monstrous tribute Cato (Alexander Ludwig). He's still a lethal killer and a massive douchebag, which is in part so we don't feel so bad about his eventual demise. In fact, a number of characters are portrayed as vicious and sadistic, which I think helps us process their deaths better. But with Cato in particular, his death scene allows for the possibility that he is not just a single-minded killing machine, but rather a confused 18-year-old who has spent his life preparing for an event in which the odds were never really in his favor. We don't quite give ourselves over to fully sympathizing with him, but his final moments on screen remind us that the true enemy is the Capitol, not this man-sized boy who is just doing what society has raised him to do. I don't know that (or I should say, can't remember whether) we get that kind of ambiguity in Cato's final moments of the book. Since he's the only real antagonist, he has to fulfill that role more unwaveringly. This moment of ambiguity gives us a good taste of what I know the thrust of the next two books will be, which is to overthrow the Capitol. We get that spirit of rebellion more overtly in the book, since we have direct access to Katniss' thoughts.

However, I should say that there are certain things the novel definitely does better. For example -- and this may be intentional to minimize the horror of what's happening to these children -- the novel does a much better job keeping track of how many tributes are remaining in the games. Upon first viewing, I was frustrated by how poorly the tributes' deaths were marked, and was surprised at how rarely they used the effect of showing their profiles in the sky after they've died. There were also times in the movie (such as Rue's death) when there is inexplicably no cannon blast accompanying the death. The novel mentions a cannon blast at the death of every fallen tribute, and discusses seeing each one appearing in the sky at day's end.

Then there was Elizabeth Banks' character, the wonderfully named Effie Trinket. When I first watched the movie, I didn't really get what her role was supposed to be, since none of the novel's dialogue about her trying to get assigned to a better district appeared in the movie. I got that she was some kind of envoy, but her role remained pretty nebulous to me. I didn't have this problem the second time -- but I think that's only because the novel helped me get a better idea of who she was.

It may just be my much-discussed notion that the first version of any story you experience is the version you're going to like best, but my ultimate conclusion, especially after my second viewing, was that the movie version of The Hunger Games was a better distillation of Collins' core ingredients than the novel. Not only do I find the casting flawless (again, a hard assessment to make since I saw the movie first), but I find that I can apply to this movie one of the highest compliments I can give any movie: There are no wasted scenes. So even clocking in at 2 hours and 20 minutes, The Hunger Games feels streamlined and fast-paced. It's a major success, a success the fullness of which I now appreciate all the more given my knowledge of the source material that was adapted into the movie.

Lest you think the novel comes off poorly in this discussion, let me say this: This is not likely an order reversal I will undertake again with this series. Its "flaws" notwithstanding, reading The Hunger Games excited me enough that I definitely plan to read Collins' next novel in the series, Catching Fire, before the movie hits theaters next Thanksgiving.

Because let's face it: Reading a book is a lot more exciting if you don't know what's going to happen, and if apparent slow points in the plot have the effect of building tension and anticipation rather than stalling before an inevitable conclusion.

Now all I need to do is read Catching Fire before November. Which will be easy if I can find it in audio book form -- and sadly, not if I can't.

Oh heck, even a slow reader like me can probably find the time before November to make it through the page-turner that I'm sure Catching Fire is. Might make some good beach reading. Which is probably the last thing anyone's thinking about at this time of year ...

Why aren't all great books movies?

As you know, I've been "reading" (i.e. listening to) audio books on my commute since I started having this 25-mile commute back in June. I told you previously that I'd read around a dozen books since then, but I guess I was exaggerating -- Dean Koontz' False Memory, the last of whose 17 discs I finished on Tuesday (just in time for it to be due back to the library on Thursday), was my tenth.

Naturally, since I watch a lot more movies than I read books, my instinct is to imagine everything I read being adapted into a movie.

My next instinct is to wonder why more of them are not.

I know that it takes a substantial financial commitment by a studio to adapt a book into a movie, and it's not a venture to be taken lightly. But with all the crap scripts that get made into movies, you'd think that more of the work of someone like Koontz would have found its way to the big screen by now.

Until False Memory, I was completely unfamiliar with Koontz' work, though I've been aware of the man for at least 20 years. Back when I was reading Stephen King all the time, I think I got the impression that Koontz was in a similar category of fiction. But as I started to grow weary of King, the prospect of a lesser King seemed pretty hacky to me. Turns out that's not really what Koontz is, but the impression stuck with me for a couple decades.

But during my current audio book era, I decided it was time to give Koontz a shot. When the experience of reading is more passive, as it is with audio books, it's a lot easier to take a gamble on something that you might not like (especially when you are borrowing them from the library rather than buying them). Instead of forcing yourself to move forward page by page, you just listen until the point where you either get into it, or it's not worth continuing. (However, since I'm a completist by nature, I do try to finish what I start.)

I knew I better like False Memory, because I was going to have to listen to it at an aggressive pace if I was going to get through 17 hour-long discs before it was due back three weeks after the day of rental.

And it turned out that I loved it. (I'll also give some credit here to the reader, Stephen Lang, who played the villainous colonel in Avatar. The guy's got some serious chops.)

This post is not about recommending False Memory to you per se, so I won't bother with a synopsis. Just know that not only was Koontz' language exquisite (this was the biggest surprise), but his plotting was masterful. I loved how and when he chose to reveal certain information, and I genuinely could not predict where the story would go.

So ... why isn't False Memory a movie?

It came out in 1999, so it's had plenty of time to get there.

In order for you to better judge whether it should be, I'll give you a couple of the elements it deals with: agoraphobia, mind control, a mystery to resolve, violence and threats of violence, a twisted villain, psychological torture, family dysfunction and creepy dreams that would make darn good trippy asides in a film. There's even an adorable dog.

And then there's the fact that it already exists out there, lying around as an untapped property. No one even needs to think it up.

My guess? You have to pay Koontz a pretty penny to get the rights to his work. It's not as simple as saying "This is a really good read. Let's make a movie out of it." It's going to cost you, probably a lot more than it would cost you to commission some green writer to come up with a Koontz ripoff.

Or maybe Koontz' writing just isn't as superior as I'm making it out to be. Maybe there are a hundred Dean Koontzes out there writing stuff like this, all of which is good enough to be made into movies. The experience of listening to these ten audio books has taught me that I'm not as discriminating a reader as maybe I thought I was. I've liked each of the ten books to varying degrees -- none of them were merely passable. Granted, you're talking about some literary classics in there, such as The Age of Innocence and Brave New World. But even one of Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch detective novels, Echo Park, left me completely satisfied and wondering about a possible film adaptation.

At least I was glad to see that some Koontz work has made it to either television or the big screen. Wikipeda shows 19 of his books adapted into movies, though almost none of them are movies I've heard of. The Ben Affleck bomb Phantoms was a Koontz adaptation, I see. Ha. (A bomb in more ways than one. In Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Jason Mewes yells to Affleck, "You da bomb in Phantoms, yo!") Stephen Sommers is directing an adaptation of his book Odd Thomas, starring Anton Yelchin, that's due out next year.

Maybe it's just that Koontz' astounding output makes it difficult to figure out which of his books to actually adapt. Wikipedia also tells me that the guy has written 106 full-length novels since 1968, not to mention another fifty-some essays and short fiction.

Whoa.

Maybe False Memory is just an average Dean Koontz novel. Which means that even if I don't have a False Memory movie coming out any time soon, I've got plenty of potential listening goodness, in the form of other Koontz novels, still ahead of me.