As good as the book — some films do soar

I love movies almost as much as I love books. Sitting in the dark, surrounded by strangers, with a bag of popcorn on my lap and lost in a story on the big screen, I’m in heaven. It’s right up there with curling up on a comfy couch with a soft fleece and a great novel.

I often fantasize about an alternative life as a film producer or director, the one calling the shots about what gets made, casting and art direction. I’m especially passionate about cinematic adaptations of books, particularly books I love.

When you truly love a book, even the best cinematic adaptation can’t quite capture it. Maybe it’s because something private and unique transpires between you and the printed page. When you see someone else’s interpretation of the private world you’ve created, it’s often jarring at best. At worst, as in the 2013 remake of “The Great Gatsby” starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire, I want to scream out loud at the filmmaker, “No, that’s not how it’s supposed to look, the actors are all wrong, you destroyed it!” I try to restrain myself.

The best booktofilm creations are those that take us somewhere new and illuminating, even if they’re not totally faithful to the original book. They make us see the book in a wholly different way. Chief among those I’d list “A Clockwork Orange” and “The Godfather.”

There are books that are slam dunks for cinematic treatment because they’re so intensely visual and we “see” the characters and the landscape in which they’re moving so vividly as we read. The Harry Potter series that director Chris Columbus (followed by Alfonso Cuarón, David Yates and Mike Newell) brought to the screen is a great example. Who didn’t have a strong visual image of Hogwarts?

There are also books that are seemingly unadaptable due to the emphasis on interiority which a talented director can make into a brilliant film. The film adaptation of JeanDominique Bauby’s “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” about his life after suffering a violent stroke that left him paralyzed, is one such example. Equally daunting was “The English Patient,” made from the book of the same name, a dreamlike nonlinear story in which the disfigured hero is confined to his bed.

Then there are the books that are crying out for cinematic treatment that Hollywood somehow overlooked, books that in my fantasy life as producer/director/film goddess I’d bring to the screen. These are the books that, as I’m reading, there’s already a movie running in my head due to compelling characters and setting.

Part of my mission would be to celebrate novels that feature older characters who maintain their dignity and still have a sense of adventure. We sorely need more movies where the main characters, despite being a bit long in the tooth, are nowhere near ready to hang it up. It drives me crazy when I see 60 or 70somethings depicted as just shy of the grave.

A good example is the protagonist of Peter Heller’s underappreciated novel “Celine,” who’s north of 70 and feisty as hell. A blueblood, socialregister type with an impeccable pedigree, she’s also a sharpshooting private investigator who lives in a tiny apartment under the Brooklyn Bridge and specializes in reuniting birth families, pro bono. Helen Mirren would kill in the role.

Her partner, with whom she has a loving, supportive relationship, is a Harvardeducated former communist, Wall Street architect, amateur historian and longhaul backpacker — also a recovering legendary drinker, as is Celine. Hello, Tommy Lee Jones. I can just see those two on a road trip up to Jackson Hole to solve a case, hanging out in rural bars that Heller describes as “packed with locals drinking beer like it was a job.”

Another novel I’d bring to the screen is Amy Bloom’s “White Houses,” a novel told from the point of view of Eleanor

Roosevelt’s intimate companion, Lorena Hickok. Hickok, a poor girl from an abusive childhood in South Dakota, grows up to be a prominent journalist who finds her way into Washington’s inner circle and, in Bloom’s telling, into the first lady’s bed.

The book is very juicy, with delectable tidbits about Franklin D’s open affair with Missy LeHand, Eleanor’s cousin Parker Fiske’s selfhating homosexuality, and lots more family and White House deceit and dysfunction. I’d cast Olivia Colman as Eleanor, and Ralph Fiennes as FDR, two Brits playing Americans in the White House — highly marketable.

My true Oscar contender would be the film adaptation of Daniel Mason’s “The Winter Soldier,” a novel that had me lost in a makeshift field hospital in the bitterly cold Carpathian Mountains during World War I — shades of Dr. Zhivago. It centers on Lucius, the son of a prominent ViennesePolish family, who meets and ultimately falls in love with Sister Margarete, a nurse at the hospital and a marvelous, strong character who essentially teaches him how to be a doctor.

Emily Watson would be my first choice for Sister Margarete. As for Lucius, I’d make Jake Gyllenhaal and James Franco audition … at length. Every job should have a few perks, right?