Reading Between The Lines Of Movie Adaptations
We headed west last Friday night, out to the far reaches of Balboa, to the Balboa Theater to watch the Swedish film based on Stieg Larsson's novel The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. You would think that being that close to the Pacific, and planning on watching a movie like this, the weather would have given us fog, a brooding noir atmosphere, even though I didn't have my fedora with me. But instead, the weather was clear and cool, so we had to watch the movie without a background atmosphere.
The novel was strong, filled with a vague sense of menace without giving too much away, and cultivating a strong sense of place--it was also a page-turner in that Marina made me put aside my other books and magazines in order to read this quickly, because she was impatient to see the movie (I finished the book earlier on Friday, which was the day the movie opened at the Balboa).
The movie kept me on the edge of my seat, partly due to the fact that the Balboa, while charmingly independent, does not exactly have the most comfortable seats, but also because the movie certainly captured the dark mood of the book.
I'm not going to spoil anything about Dragon but I have to say, I enjoyed watching The Ghost Writer more. In part, this is because they are both mysteries/thrillers, and I already knew the course of events in Dragon. That tends to drain some of the fun out of a thriller when you know what thrills are about to happen.
Dragon had a lot going for it. It caught the tone of the novel quite well. But I struggled the whole time with comparing the movie version of the story with the original novel.
This is always a problem. I think it is commonly accepted as a mathematical constant that the novel will always be better than the movie adaptation (conversely, the novelization of a movie always comes off as lame and cheap, but that's not the purpose of this blog). The exception is High Fidelity, where the movie is strong in its own right.
Here's the difference. High Fidelity has a storyline that is fairly simple and mostly character-driven. Therefore, it can be translated into a movie without sacrificing too much.
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, like, for example, The Da Vinci Code, is primarily plot-driven, a puzzle, with twists and turns and subplots. Unlike Dan Brown, however, Stieg Larsson can actually create some depth in his characters so that they are more than just ciphers or a plot device; nevertheless, in trying to capture even 65% of the plot from the novel, the movie has to let a lot of character development fall by the wayside. Blomkvist, the main character, who is fairly interesting in the book, is a bland figure in the movie, swept aside behind the plot.
The other problem in making a movie from a novel like this is choosing which sub-plots to include, which to conflate, and which to drop all together. If you don't choose the right threads, to someone who has read the book there will be glaring omissions or things that seem unreal, at least. And sometimes, it is possible to refer to something in the novel and then not connect it to the rest of the movie, so it is left hanging.
Obviously to include everything from the novel would make for a stupefyingly long film. But I have a hard time separating the novel from the movie, and I'm not sure if that is fair to the hard work done in producing the movie. However, it really is impossible to not bring the novel to the movie, as it were, once you've read the novel. Unless you are lucky enough to have short-term memory loss, of course.
What do you think? What are the most successful adaptations of novels into movies? What made them successful? Should and can a novel and the film be considered entirely separately?
The novel was strong, filled with a vague sense of menace without giving too much away, and cultivating a strong sense of place--it was also a page-turner in that Marina made me put aside my other books and magazines in order to read this quickly, because she was impatient to see the movie (I finished the book earlier on Friday, which was the day the movie opened at the Balboa).
The movie kept me on the edge of my seat, partly due to the fact that the Balboa, while charmingly independent, does not exactly have the most comfortable seats, but also because the movie certainly captured the dark mood of the book.
I'm not going to spoil anything about Dragon but I have to say, I enjoyed watching The Ghost Writer more. In part, this is because they are both mysteries/thrillers, and I already knew the course of events in Dragon. That tends to drain some of the fun out of a thriller when you know what thrills are about to happen.
Dragon had a lot going for it. It caught the tone of the novel quite well. But I struggled the whole time with comparing the movie version of the story with the original novel.
This is always a problem. I think it is commonly accepted as a mathematical constant that the novel will always be better than the movie adaptation (conversely, the novelization of a movie always comes off as lame and cheap, but that's not the purpose of this blog). The exception is High Fidelity, where the movie is strong in its own right.
Here's the difference. High Fidelity has a storyline that is fairly simple and mostly character-driven. Therefore, it can be translated into a movie without sacrificing too much.
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, like, for example, The Da Vinci Code, is primarily plot-driven, a puzzle, with twists and turns and subplots. Unlike Dan Brown, however, Stieg Larsson can actually create some depth in his characters so that they are more than just ciphers or a plot device; nevertheless, in trying to capture even 65% of the plot from the novel, the movie has to let a lot of character development fall by the wayside. Blomkvist, the main character, who is fairly interesting in the book, is a bland figure in the movie, swept aside behind the plot.
The other problem in making a movie from a novel like this is choosing which sub-plots to include, which to conflate, and which to drop all together. If you don't choose the right threads, to someone who has read the book there will be glaring omissions or things that seem unreal, at least. And sometimes, it is possible to refer to something in the novel and then not connect it to the rest of the movie, so it is left hanging.
Obviously to include everything from the novel would make for a stupefyingly long film. But I have a hard time separating the novel from the movie, and I'm not sure if that is fair to the hard work done in producing the movie. However, it really is impossible to not bring the novel to the movie, as it were, once you've read the novel. Unless you are lucky enough to have short-term memory loss, of course.
What do you think? What are the most successful adaptations of novels into movies? What made them successful? Should and can a novel and the film be considered entirely separately?
posted by Devin at 9:36 PM
1 Comments:
Okay so I actually thought about this, hampered by the fact that a)I read very few novels and b) see very few movies! What I have to offer is just this. I think one of the most successful adaptations I've seen is "Clueless," from Jane Austen's Emma. What I appreciate about it is that it translates the essential ideas and motivations and personalities so well, yet in a completely different context and time frame.
Post a Comment
<< Home