Of the 98 films that have won the Oscar for Best Picture, around half derive from books. Stanley Kubrick, a serial adapter, explained that a strong story frees a director to take creative risks, as well as giving backers “their best chance to get their money back and hopefully make a profit”. John le Carré, a novelist who made plenty of profit, is said to have put it another way: “Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.”
This tiff between the page and the screen is explored in Louise Willder’s jocular inquiry The Book Was Better. She argues there’s “snobbery or braggery” in preferring the original, and that most keen readers can cite films that disembowel all that is good in a novel (on that note, how about Oliver Parker’s 2009 Dorian Gray or The Hobbit trilogy—a trilogy!).
The literary naysayer par excellence is Virginia Woolf. In her essay “The Cinema” (1926), written just before the advent of “talkies”, Woolf laments film’s relative lack of depth:
“So we lurch and lumber through the most famous novels of the world. So we spell them out in words of one syllable, written, too, in the scrawl of an illiterate schoolboy. A kiss is love. A broken cup is jealousy. A grin is happiness. Death is a hearse. None of these things has the least connexion with the novel…”
Generally, it’s an adaptation’s changes—its excisions, interpretations, and wild fabrications—that seem to most annoy readers. The same is often true for authors. Stephen King was so exercised by Kubrick’s version of The Shining that he bought back the rights and wrote his own screenplay:
“The character of Jack Torrance has no arc in that movie. Absolutely no arc at all. When we first see Jack Nicholson… he’s crazy as a shit house rat. All he does is get crazier. In the book, he’s a guy who’s struggling with his sanity and finally loses it. To me, that’s a tragedy. In the movie, there’s no tragedy because there’s no real change.”
King has a point. However, his own adaptation, a three-part TV series, is widely considered a dud. It has a 6.1 rating on IMDb and a 54 per cent score on Rotten Tomatoes, compared with 8.4 and 84 per cent for Kubrick’s.
Sometimes an adaptation’s alterations are explained by censorship. As Willder describes, from 1934 to 1968, Hollywood policed itself with the Hays Code, which—partly to head off government censorship—set the moral boundaries for cinema. The code forbade such evils as interracial romance and ridicule of the law, and even insisted that surgical operations be handled in “good taste”.
To comply with the code, John Ford’s version of The Grapes of Wrath softened John Steinbeck’s descriptions of the conditions faced by migrants from the Dust Bowl. A clear example is the film’s ending—which, ironically, eschews an image perfect for the screen. Ford’s film finishes with the Joad family driving somewhat optimistically through California. Steinbeck’s novel concludes with Rosasharn, who has just given birth to a lifeless child, breastfeeding a starving man.
Directors do, however, need to take licence. Even if a book provides most of the characterisation and narrative backbone, the screen is a very different medium. And if a film shows too much reverence, viewers would be better off simply reading the book. Changes, or “interpretations”, can be creatively interesting—even when they’re not fully convincing.
Take Karel Reisz’s 1981 adaptation of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles’s novel with multiple endings. In his screenplay, Harold Pinter added a parallel (and meta) story of two actors in the process of filming The French Lieutenant’s Woman. These scenes are set more than a century after the events of Fowles’s novel, but they’re in keeping with its postmodern spirit. Rather than film every one of a book’s tiny details, it might be more ‘faithful’ for an adaptation to try to transfer a novel’s spirit onto the screen.
Films also have narrative advantages. As Willder reminds us, they can communicate non-verbally—with soundtrack, set design, and close-ups. She cites a moment near the end of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day, where Mr Stevens, a stiff-lipped butler consumed by ideals of dignity, narrates: “my heart was breaking”. In James Ivory’s 1993 film, the rolling camera lets Anthony Hopkins convey Stevens’s repressed emotion with more subtlety and tenderness.
For Ishiguro—a Nobel-winning novelist who also has an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay—an adaptation should “move on” from the original:
“I have aspirations for my stories to be like those of, say, Homer. Or to become like certain fairytales and myths, moving through the centuries and varying cultures, adapting and growing to speak to different audiences. My novels are themselves made up of materials I’ve inherited, imbibed and remoulded. When something goes from book to film it’s a campfire opportunity: it’s when the story should grow and evolve.”
Willder explores the merits of adaptation with trenchant wit. Her book is thought-provoking yet commendably light. She describes Matt Damon’s “bland good looks” as perfect for Tom Ripley’s “thoroughly forgettable face”, and says of Ayn Rand: “Her credo is best summed up as ‘won’t somebody please think of the billionaires?’… couched in hundreds of pages of unreadable prose.”
Books give cinema the foundations of story, and a proof of concept. It’s unlikely that Willder’s will be adapted for the screen even though, as Kubrick supposedly said, “If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.” However, should Hollywood come calling, Willder’s readers will surely say the book was better.
Now read about a new television series that Daniel Rey says “touches the gold standard for literary adaptation”
