It is always fun to join in a craze, like a Victorian going mad for penny farthings. Which is probably why, against my better judgment, I went to see Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster The Odyssey this summer, buying my ticket into the popular conversation along with everyone else. This year’s other divisive adaptation, Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, had the world and his wife arguing about it before they had even watched the film.
No doubt the makers of the recent Sense and Sensibility movie were also hoping for lots of people to go and see it to discover whether they hated it. After all, very few of us leave the cinema saying: “That’s exactly how I pictured it in my head.” Or even less likely: “That was better than the book.” We’re more likely to shake our fists at how they ruined the ending, dumbed it down, unforgivably cast somebody with the wrong hair, or betrayed a beloved character, as with last year’s Thursday Murder Club debacle. But what makes a good adaptation?
Like Odysseus himself, and as every Nancy Meyers fan knows: it’s complicated. I have just written a book about the towering heights and profane depths of adaptation, The Book Was Better, for which I subjected myself to some of the worst viewing experiences possible, including the soft rock opera musical Heathcliff; 1996’s freakishly bad The Island of Dr Moreau; and a horrible three-part version of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. But I also saw plenty of masterpieces that equalled or sometimes surpassed the originals.
The first thing to say is that the quality of the source is irrelevant. I went into my research with some pretty fixed ideas: for instance, that “the brilliant adaptations are nearly always of fiction of the second or third class”, as Anthony Burgess wrote; that some works are “unfilmable”; that classics have more “room to breathe” on TV. Soon I realised none of these were true.
Yes, sometimes workmanlike novels, such as the late 60s and early 70s triumvirate Jaws, The Godfather and The Exorcist, can be tuned to a level of genius on screen. But great books can make great films, too: Trainspotting, The Go-Between, The Leopard and Burgess’s own A Clockwork Orange are just a few examples. And sometimes, in the case of The Da Vinci Code and Fifty Shades of Grey, a deeply silly book becomes a deeply silly film.
It is true that certain books lend themselves to the screen more readily. Jane Austen’s immaculate plots of love impeded are templates that can be dressed up in the clothes of any age, like the computer template Cher Horowitz uses to plan her outfits at the start of Clueless – the ne plus ultra of free-handed adaptations. Austen’s novels contain the DNA of all romcoms, just as Robinson Crusoe is found in The Martian, the gothic novel in horror films, or A Christmas Carol in every single Christmas movie.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
