So Hollywood has made a hash of Anna Karenina<\/i>. That\u2019s a disappointment. Joe Wright and Keira Knightley have teamed up before in films based on significant novels, with mixed success. Viewers liked or didn\u2019t like their Atonement<\/i> for the same reason they liked or didn\u2019t like the book and its last-minute emotional switcheroo. Before that, they made the really awful Pride and Prejudice<\/i>\u2014a box-office success that made Austen fans cringe. (The last scene, yuck! Yuck!)<\/p>\n
When I heard\u00a0Knightley would play Anna, I admit to being skeptical. Perhaps it\u2019s the way she\u2019s photographed, but she\u2019s always too \u201con,\u201d too aware of her external self, her perfect face, never revealing anything inside. Is anything inside? As Anna, \u201cthere\u2019s nothing to discover in her face because she\u2019s too much in ours,\u201d said New York<\/i> magazine critic David Edelstein.<\/p>\n
Alas, what gives many novels their power is that internal stuff. Somehow moviemakers have to move the story and the characters with their balled-up and conflicting desires\/histories\/strengths\/flaws from page to pixel. This week, at the last session of my class on Dickens, we watched excerpts from a 1983 video\/film adaptation of one of the books we\u2019d read, Dombey & Son<\/i>. Squeezing a 950-page novel into even 300 minutes (10, 30-minute episodes) inevitably loses a lot, especially a book like Dombey<\/i>, where the main plot drivers are characters\u2019 internal \u201cheart,\u201d not external events. (That would be A Tale of Two Cities<\/i>.) Still, it captured much of the essence and was not nearly so awful as 1998\u2019s \u201cmodernized\u201d Great Expectations<\/i>.<\/p>\n
It isn\u2019t easy to modernize the classics, though Clueless<\/i> did just fine in updating Emma<\/i>. Pip\u2019s determination to \u201cbe a gentleman\u201d doesn\u2019t resonate today. Dombey\u2019s wife\u2019s desire for a divorce doesn\u2019t carry the same shock as 160 years ago. Pages of exposition that help readers today understand the characters\u2019 view of the world and why particular issues are fundamental to them are necessarily lost. When they are put before us on screen without all that context, they feel like cardboard cutouts, \u201ca bright red heart without a beat,\u201d as film critic Peter Howell said of the new Anna.<\/i><\/p>\n
Lack of a heart, a center, isn\u2019t confined to films of the classics; even movies of modern books can be frustratingly opaque. Those are the films where you say to yourself, \u201cWhat does she see<\/i> in him?\u201d or \u201cWhy is he doing<\/i> that?\u201d Oddly, what would seem an unlikely novel to make a successful transition to film was Life of Pi<\/i>. The filmmakers used the long stretches at sea to present uncluttered narration that revealed Pi\u2019s character. The movie works because the people in it and their motivations are understood, viewers can empathize with them, and they find a little piece of Pi\u2019s struggle within their own hearts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So Hollywood has made a hash of Anna Karenina. That\u2019s a disappointment. Joe Wright and Keira Knightley have teamed up before in films based on significant novels, with mixed success. Viewers liked or didn\u2019t like their Atonement for the same … Continue reading