Reviews

A big novel's length is always a challenge to a film adaptation of the work. When six novels are involved, as is the case here (from Olivia Manning's The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy), the task of adapting the work means most of it gets left behind. How to produce a script that retains some of the novel's uniqueness and flavor but is still coherent to viewers unfamiliar with the novel? Various solutions come to mind. For example, Volker Schlöndorff wisely bit off only the first third of Günter Grass's masterpiece, The Tin Drum, and created a film that at times exceeds its source material in power and impact. And against all odds, the young Ray Bradbury managed to extract key scenes and language from Moby Dick to come up with a script which, when coupled with a decent director (John Huston) and good casting choices (I'm thinking here of Orson Welles as Father Mapple), made a pretty decent movie.

Sadly, with Fortunes of War, casting works against the film. Where Guy Pringle is a big bear of a man in the novels, Branagh's sensitive Guy just isn't the same character. And where Harriet Pringle is a small and at times frail woman in the novels, Thompson's Harriet is, well, Emma Thompson. This is not a small matter. The novels' point of view is that of Harriet and what we get there is a detailed, personal, even intimate view of the Pringles' marriage. If you read these novels all in a rush, you almost become Harriet Pringle for a time, immersed in the details of her marriage, seeing the world through her eyes. There's a toughness to Harriet, but also vulnerability, something that Guy often misses as he plunges into one project after another. Little of this comes through in the film.

Of course something will get lost in the translation from the literary to the filmic – this is a challenge all film adaptations have to face. But in this film, the mismatch of the lead actors and the characters they play is simply too much to overcome.

"Purple Noon" (1960, original title "Plein soleil") is French director Rene Clement's take on Patricia Highsmith's "The Talented Mr. Ripley". Highsmith's novels have been favored by a number of international directors, including Hitchcock and Wenders and more recently Minghella's own attempt to get at Mr. Ripley.

There is much to like about this movie visually. The views of the Italian Mediterranean, the street scenes in Rome and of village life, even the daytime holiday celebration (fireworks in daylight!) are breathtaking, the sort of thing you hope one day to be able to see on a really big screen. The feel of the movie is right too, effortlessly recreating Italy in the 50s, down to the cars, clothes, food, and people on the street.

What's wrong is the characters, a problem most other directors of Highsmith's novels have had. To begin with, the ostensibly American Philippe (Philip) Greenleaf, Tom Ripley, and Marge Duval are most decidedly non-Americans. They don't look like Americans, they don't act like Americans, and they certainly don't move like Americans. Only the character of Freddy Miles is credibly American and then perhaps only because he's in so few scenes.

A more serious problem is that Clement doesn't appear to know who Ripley is, or at least doesn't know who Highsmith's Ripley is. In the various Ripley novels, written over a period of nearly forty years, Ripley is an amoral killer who is often forced to murder out of loyalty or to keep his past a secret. In Clement's hands, Ripley is puerile, almost juvenile, with a fairly good motive for hurting Greenleaf. Only during the scenes of Ripley alone on the boat can you catch a glimpse of Highsmith's Ripley. But as soon as he's back in the company of Marge and the others he once again becomes something almost pathetic, almost pathological.

Why is it so difficult for film directors to capture certain literary characters? In Ripley's case, perhaps it's because he's neither a basically good character nor a truly bad character. He's somewhere else on the moral landscape, someone who in the novels definitely feels guilt and anguish over what he does, although in Ripley these are not the character-destroying emotions you would expect but rather a kind of painful regret or feeling of disloyalty. Clement's attempts to capture this, if indeed that's what he was trying to do, feel completely wrong. I'm thinking of the several scenes of Ripley ravenously eating after committing a crime. Is Ripley emotionally starved? It's hard to say, but these scenes come across more as black humor than as insights into Ripley's character. At one point, after committing a murder, Ripley gazes out the window at children playing innocently on the street below. Without a narrator, it's hard to figure what's going on in his head here. Guilt? Relief? Longing? Or is he just checking to see if the coast is clear?

"Purple Noon" has great suspense and, despite its trick ending, will remain in your head, vivid and pleasantly memorable, long after viewing. But for readers of Highsmith's novels it will always feel like a bit of a failure.

Gwen (Bullock) is in rehab, a party girl, alcoholic, addict, and writer ... but writer of _what_? This appears to be the chief problem of this film: Who _is_ Gwen? Flashbacks of her childhood with alcoholic mother and scenes of the final drunken blow-out day of her sister's wedding that landed her 28 days in rehab or jail (her choice) are not enough. It's okay that the rehab denizens are stock characters right out of Cuckoo's Nest and maybe Rose Garden, but not okay that the central character is so thin. Lot's of nice little comedic moments here - I'm thinking of the PeeWee Herman-ish zoom-in that Bullock gives a baseball when told to really _look_ at it by Eddie (Mortensen) - but that's just not enough.

Books are almost never based on movies and so we have no way of judging whether they would be better or worse than the originals. Movies, on the other hand, are constantly being created out of other materials. Whether this is simply a historical accident due to their recent arrival on the scene we'll never know. But we do know that movies are almost universally inferior to the books they're based on, at least in how well they translate the book author's original vision.

The Sweet Hereafter might be an exception to this. Based on Russell Banks' novel of the same name, Egoyan's Hereafter raises an at-times undistinguished novel to a different plane. Where the novel gives us first-person accounts that sound a bit phony and too much alike in places, the movie gives us well-cast characters whose differing points of view are as clear as the film's wintertime images.

The novel takes place in upstate New York. Inevitably, Egoyan has moved the setting slightly north and made the story slightly more Canadian (how else to account for the presence of the ever-so-non-American Ian Holm). But in doing so he has also pared away some of the novel's fat. In particular he eliminated the goofy pseudo-mythical final section at the county fair dirt track, a chapter that feels like something out of Robert Coover's The Origin of the Brunists. It's almost as though Egoyan saw and understood this story more clearly than Banks did. I can't think of higher praise for a director.