MOVIE MEMOIRS
Sali Hughes on the films that shaped her life THE CRUSHING ADAPTATION THE GREAT GATSBY
LAST MONTH, SOMETHING happened that sounds exactly like a thing a columnist would make up to introduce a column. No one is more surprised than I am that it’s completely true. My 13-yearold son (an average kid, not generally a weeper) came home from the cinema and went straight up to bed, slamming the door behind him. I followed him up and found him slumped in his bunk, crestfallen and tearful. “Ready Player One is my favourite book, I’ve been waiting all year to see the film, and it’s all wrong”. I explained that the film was a director’s personal interpretation of a book and maybe Spielberg simply had an entirely different reading to his. “No. He just completely changed the plot. He ruined it”.
In fairness, I didn’t even believe my own conciliatory words. As I processed what seemed at first an overreaction, it occurred to me that the unfaithful (or worse still, unfaithful and rubbish) adaptation of a beloved book is a universal pain that one can rarely avoid taking personally, even well into adulthood.
I am not, for instance, anywhere near over 2010’s film Never Let Me Go, a soulless adaptation of the dystopian masterpiece, that made me itch to perform Keira Knightley’s multiple organ transplants myself. It’s been a full five years since the release of Baz Luhrmann’s version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s roaring ’20s melodrama The Great Gatsby, and my fury over what was baffling casting has not waned. Leonardo Dicaprio is decades too old, and the slightly simpering, perpetually anxious looking Carey Mulligan is simply not the book’s shallow, capricious snob Daisy Buchanan — Michelle Williams obviously is, as anyone with eyes in their head could see. There’s consequently not a molecule of chemistry between the two characters. And don’t get me started on the film’s art direction, so spectacularly grandiose and lavish, that someone was clearly buffing a chandelier when they should’ve been polishing a script. I left the cinema bereft at the squandered opportunity and returned to the book in an attempt to restore the truth, enjoying only a brief sabbatical before the travesty that was Gone Girl.
Many people seem to just accept poor adaptations, as though entirely inevitable. Certainly, there are practical difficulties in translating books to film — time, the absence of interior monologue, the prohibitive cost of multiple settings and shooting locations. But I take issue with the intellectually snobbish theory that books are inherently superior to films. The Godfather is a masterpiece, both on paper and celluloid. Goodfellas is better than (the already excellent) Wiseguy, Clueless is an Austen adaptation of rare genius, and I felt every bit as terrified, tense and thrilled watching Misery and The Silence Of The Lambs, as I did while reading them. Brilliant adaptations take a winning recipe, and some complementary ingredients, and make it their own while preserving the taste. It’s entirely possible and saves moviegoers from the unique pain of seeing a beloved text hacked and filleted into a 150 minute slot.
Books take place in our imaginations, films make our imaginations a reality. To find they’ve been reimagined beyond all recognition by another, is painful. The only solution is to treat book and film as two separate entities, adding or subtracting nothing to the other, to be enjoyed without prejudice. Otherwise it’s not fair, like starting at your swotty brother’s school and finding the teachers waiting to judge you against his merits. This is what I advised my son, anyway. That, and to never see The Golden Compass.