Learning to Adapt-Norbert Brown
Learning to Adapt
By Norbert Brown
From Nosferatu to No Country for Old Men, the history of film is a history of adapting material from other media. Some of moviedom’s greatest triumphs have been adaptations (Gone with the Wind, The Silence of the Lambs), as have some of its most resounding failures (The Da Vinci Code, The Scarlet Letter with Demi Moore).
During the busy holiday movie season, a whole slew of movies with adapted screenplays found their way into mall-side humongo-plexes all over the country. And the results were decidedly mixed. Here’s a look at three recent adaptations – taken together they tell a cautionary Goldilocks-like tale: one is so slavishly loyal to its source that it’s downright hard to sit through, one takes so many liberties that it turns into a soft and spongy retelling, and one is just right.
Too Hard: The Golden Compass
The Golden Compass (the novel, that is) is one of those first-in-a-trilogy books that is loaded with set-up and establishing detail. With a healthy 400 or so pages to work with, author Philip Pullman has plenty of time to establish all that detail. He’s also got all the word count he needs to create a vivid, intriguing parallel universe while at the same time laying the groundwork for the religiously skeptical, humanistic dissertation that the His Dark Materials trilogy (of which The Golden Compass is Book I) eventually becomes.
The film version, alas, is plagued by two conflicting weaknesses. On the one hand, there’s all that detail to include, and the movie makers don’t want to leave too much out just in case there’s a market for movie two and movie three (sorry guys – not looking good). So the film has this overstuffed, bloated feeling throughout – like a Christmas tree that has to hold every ornament that every kid in the family ever made in first grade.
On the other hand, in its attempt to avoid offending the all-important Christian demographic, the movie is as entirely expunged of Pullman’s philosophical underpinnings as possible. This is an attempt to get the people who paid money into The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings franchises to fork over for this one. Of course, those two series were penned by, respectively, one of the most influential Christian writers of the 20th century (C.S. Lewis) and the friend most responsible for converting Lewis from atheism (J.R.R. Tolkien). So once you get past magical happenings, intelligent non-humans and kids hiding in wardrobes, The Golden Compass doesn’t really have a lot in common with either of the earlier fantasy classics.
Unless, of course, you count casting. Two Lord of the Rings veterans make appearances – Ian McCellan voices one of the talking animals, and Christopher Lee takes one more how-can-he-possibly-not-be-dead-yet turn in a small role. Otherwise, the cast is generally unremarkable – Daniel Craig is passable as a mostly absent good guy; Nicole Kidman has much more screen time and proves that she can really wear nice clothes well. Neither actor can be flawed too much though: Pullman’s multifaceted characters have been pretty well reduced to white-hat good guy and black-hat bad girl, and they do what they can with the material. Young Dakota Blue Richards (what is up with all these little kids named Dakota?) is a great Lyra – capturing the nuance and complexity of the story in the lead role better than anything else does in this bulging, boring movie.
Too soft: Beowulf
Okay, by now there’s been enough written about the animation style and state-of-the-art 3-D technique used to make Beowulf, so I’m not even going to go there. Yes, it’s cool that the “camera” can follow as a rat is snatched from the rafters of the mead hall, held in the talons of a hawk and carried through the night to Grendel’s cave. Sure, Angelina Jolie (or, in any case, her avatar) looks hot dressed entirely in gold paint, and what a handy way to deal with all those stupid tattoos. But what about the movie itself?
In truth, it’s not bad. Once you start forgetting to wonder if the freckles in the close-ups are actually on the actors’ faces or were created by some animator with a freckle fetish, it’s a pretty engaging, visually rich movie experience.
And what a surprise to discover that this ancient story – based on an epic poem written around the 8th Century AD which was itself based on even older oral tradition – is so topical and contemporary in its depiction of a hero tortured by guilt and done in by his own deceit and fatal weakness.
Except, guess what? It’s not. Screenwriters Neil Gaiman and Roger Avery and director Robert Zemeckis take more liberties with this story than your average Viking takes pillaging a village. In the poem, Grendel’s mother is herself a monster, in this film, she’s Angelina Jolie. Sure, her hair has a mind of its own and she has these disturbing stiletto heels (not shoes – heels), but otherwise she’s, well, pretty far from monstrous. In the poem, Beowulf fights and kills her. In the movie, she seduces him. In the poem, he fights a dragon. In the film, he also fights a dragon, but first he fathers it. I could go on, but you get the picture.
So while Beowulf is entertaining and is certainly some of the best 3-D you’ve ever seen, don’t make the mistake of walking out of the theater feeling more educated in the classics. It really isn’t an adaptation, it’s a reinvention.
Just Right: Sweeney Todd
There are some moments that any theater-lover holds forever – stage experiences they will never forget. For me, one of those was seeing Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou in Sweeny Todd on Broadway. That was a long time ago, and at the time I don’t think I could have imagined making that tremendous, very stagey, operatic musical into a movie. But now, all these years later, it’s been done and done well – done beautifully – by Tim Burton.
Burton’s major accomplishment in this film is actually in the adaptation itself: it is rethought and redesigned for the screen, yet it is true and loyal to the source material in all the right ways.
Sweeney Todd is more than just a musical, it is a soaring operatic melodrama. Burton’s love and respect for Stephen Sondheim’s amazing music comes through from the first moment of the credits and continues throughout, and he captures the heroically giant inner lives of his characters while creating for them a vivid (if monochromatic) world of 19th Century London.
Burton is wise and careful in his musical choices: virtually all of the lead and supporting characters sing, but gone are the resounding choral pieces that are so much a part of the stage production. Sondheim fans will miss them (I was secretly hoping to hear a basso profundo boom out “Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd” over the closing credits), but the choice was a good one: this vision of the mean streets of London would be much harder to realize with peddlers harmonizing all over the place.
Also featured from the first moment of the credits is blood. Blood falling from the sky, oozing through the sewers, wrapping itself around the gears of a machine. It’s as though Burton is warning us: get ready, this story is not going to be pretty – it’s blood from top to bottom. And he lives up to his word. It is a bloody film, and because Burton does not turn away from the essential violence of Sweeney Todd, you may find that you have to. But that violence and bloodshed is part and parcel of the obsessive revenge that is at the core of this movie.
On stage or on film, this is a character-based story. Sweeney Todd returns angered and embittered to his native London, after being falsely imprisoned by a corrupt judge who wants to steal his wife. On his return he learns that not only is his wife dead, but his daughter has been taken in and raised by the judge. He swears revenge, and begins a killing rampage with the assistance of his landlady, Mrs. Lovett. Mrs. Lovett owns a filthy meat pie shop – “the worst pies in London” she brags – but the quantity and quality of her pies improves as Todd begins his killing spree. Hmmm. Yuck.
On stage, Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett are well past their prime. Burton’s couple, played by Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, certainly show signs of wear and tear. But they possess a sensuality that adds a nice dimension to the story and that works well on screen. This team of Burton, Depp and Bonham Carter has a lot of personal and professional history, which only serves to enhance the collaboration. The supporting cast is uniformly excellent: from Alan Rickman’s greasy judge to young Ed Sanders as the boy Toby – a fine child actor with a powerhouse voice. Expect to see more of him.
Depp thoroughly holds his own as a singer in this film, but if there is one flaw to find it is with Bonham Carter’s handling of the music. It’s passable, but one can’t help but remember that this role has been a triumph on stage for singers like Lansbury and Patti LuPone. Helena Bonham Carter sure as heck isn’t in that league. In fact, I found myself thinking how fortunate she was to be voicing the role in a movie, where level adjustments and sound editing can cover a multitude of sins.
But that’s really just one more testament to Burton’s skill in adaptation: Helena Bonham Carter has the right look for his vision of this story and she’s got all the acting chops she needs (and then some) to pull it off. Casting a stage diva in the role would have been easy – and completely wrong.
But Burton doesn’t make that wrong move, nor does he make any others. This film adaptation does what it should – it reinterprets the material without reinventing it, making it not just a great story, but a really terrific film. Just right.
Copyright C 2007 Norbert Brown