Filmic Great Expectations

For all those who do not feel excited when they see their favourite book adapted into a film, here comes a short article that tries to spot the reasons for this attitude.
Recently I was reading an article in The Times by Iain Finlayson that examined the way that films can influence our reading of books. He suggests that there are “readers” and there are “viewers”. Viewers will read the book only after having seen the film and so they will adopt the director’s “look” upon it. I totally agree with Finlayson’s view but I can’t help thinking how books influence the way we watch films.
When you are a bookworm and at the same time a movie buff people easily assume that every time a film based on a book comes out, you will rush to the nearest cinema, sit comfortably and spend two hours in a state of bliss for seeing your favorite paper characters in flesh and blood. But that’s not the whole picture.
I believe that we, readers, are most of the times confined to our personal perspective and interpretation of a book and this often prevents us from appreciating its filmic adaptation. We judge the film according to our literary –great (?) – expectations and I think that you will agree with me if I say that these expectations are rarely outranked. And, my dear readers, this is not the director’s fault –or at least, not always-.
It is generally acclaimed that every reading of a book is a rewriting. To put it simply, although all of us may read the same book, we will perceive different meanings from it. Our upbringing, our experiences, our taste and aesthetic shape our interpretation of the text. And, since what you actually see when reading a book is a number of words, your imagination is free to run wild and create a whole new world, a literary reality, as a setting. You can place your characters in your neighborhood or somewhere you’ve never been before and it doesn’t matter because they are where you want them to be. It is this sense of control that we enjoy as readers and it is this control that we are deprived of as viewers. Now it is the director who decides where the characters move, what they wear, what they say and how they look. Most of the times, this can be really frustrating.
Book adaptations are very popular in cinema because they offer a good narrative (a truly original script seldom appears nowadays) and a big potential audience. Of course, the director and the producer need to bear in mind some factors that may determine their film’s reception by this potential audience and therefore its career in the box office. The majority of the readers want to see what they have read and not the director’s interpretation of the book. That is why, when Alfonso Kuarón’s Great Expectations came out, the audience seemed at least perplexed. Most of them expected to see a Victorian setting and were confronted with a modern one making the change too severe for the readers. The casting of the film helped the movie but most of Dickens classic fans found it a failure. Usually, a faithful representation of the book works with the audience unless it’s too academic. James’ Ivory adaptations of books like The Remains of a Day and Room with a View are examples of successful adaptations both for critics and the audience.
Turning a book into a film can be a very demanding and energy-consuming job. Books have so many details; interior monologues, pages of dialogues without action, overwhelming descriptions of places, persons and feelings. But as Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, puts it:”You can have 10 pages describing the feelings and the frustration of your heroine and these cannot possibly be rendered to a film, but in a movie you have Nicole Kidman looking at a kid as if she’s at the hell’s bottom, Meryl Streep breaking an egg with hollow violence and Julianne Moore crying at the bathroom while talking happily to her husband. And this in a way counterparts numerous pages of narration.” Personally, I consider Stephen Daldry’s film The Hours as an ideal example of how a film can respect the spirit of a book (in this case the spirit of two books since Virginia’s Woolf Mrs. Dalloway haunts The Hours, both the film and the book).
Certainly, a lot of people may disagree with my examples of successful or unsuccessful adaptations but, as I mentioned above, this is natural since my view of a book and a film differs significantly from another’s. We are different people after all. Hence, my admiration for the sympathetic attitude of Anthony Minghella towards Patricia Highsmith’s amoral Mr. Ripley in his Talented Mr. Ripley may not be shared by many of you. Some probably prefer Alain Delon as Mr. Ripley, in Rene Clement Purple Moon (Plein Soleil) but I find Matt Damon ideal, exactly because he is the way I had portrayed Mr. Ripley when I first read the book. Or what can I say for Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings? Only the fact that he managed to film Tolkin’s epic would be enough but I truly believe that he did it in a wonderful way, satisfying most of Tolkin’s fans without sacrificing his personal style.
Nowadays, every best selling book’s fate is to be immediately adapted for the cinema (e. g Code Da Vinci) and therefore, most of us sooner or later will be confronted with what the filmmaker had read. I suggest that we leave our prejudices aside and try to appreciate the film and if possible, judge it not by whether it was a good adaptation but by whether it was a good film. It is really difficult and sometimes several viewings are required before we can achieve this level of objectivity. The more favorite the book, the bigger the chances of hating the film. Maybe we are simply jealous of the director because he/she did professionally what we do as amateurs in our mind. Maybe it is a fact that readers can never be just viewers. But I think it would be a good idea next time not allow to the ‘’reader’’ part of ourselves blur the vision of the viewer that all he asks is to enjoy a well-made film.