I just can’t see 'Blindness' translating to film
Posted: Tuesday, September 30, 2008 6:30 AM by Paige Newman
Filed Under:
Movies
It is possible to make a great movie based on an equally terrific book. “To Kill a Mockingbird” is proof of that, as is last year’s “No Country For Old Men.” This week, two wildly different books hit the big screen: Jose Saramago’s “Blindness” and Toby Young’s “How To Lose Friends and Alienate People.”
Having read both books and seen neither movie, I still feel safe saying that “How to Lose Friends” will be the better movie. Is it the better book? Not by a long shot, but this fish-out-of-water memoir about a brash British journalist who goes to work at Vanity Fair and makes all the wrong moves, has a much easier journey to make to film.
Miramax |
Is the effect of using bleached out lighting supposed to remind us of being blind in "Blindness"?
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Saramago’s book, about an epidemic of blindness engulfing a city, is a fascinating, moving story, but one that allows the reader to fumble along in the darkness with the characters. Part of the pleasure and pain of that book comes with putting yourself in the place of those who are going blind. How could that possibly translate to film?
Translation difficulty is the culprit with many books that fail as movies. I’m always amazed that people keep trying to redo “The Great Gatsby” (most recently as a miniseries on A&E). To begin with, the book has an unreliable narrator and the story is never truly about Gatsby; it’s about Nick Carraway’s reaction to the novel's events – which makes this classic far too internal to succeed as a film. In much the same way, this is why neither film version of “All the King’s Men” works. (Yeah, I know the 1949 film won an Oscar, but so what?) That incredibly engrossing book is about Jack Burden’s internal struggle, but the filmmakers turn it into the Willie Stark story.
Many people love Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts,” based on the stories of Raymond Carver. But I’m not one of them. Those stories are among my favorites, and it’s their Hemingway-like sparseness that makes them work. Carver allows you room to get in there and create with him, because he’s asking you to play a role in visualizing the story. Having Altman do that for me ruins the magic of those stories.
Jane Austen’s books work as films, because the reader functions as audience. We follow the plights of one character, who always voices how she feels to someone, and we believe and root for her. The role we play as reader or viewer remains the same.
It’s those books that ask readers to participate in something a bit more challenging that don’t work onscreen. Whether that challenge is a lengthy timespan, an unreliable narrator, an internal story, or having to visualize something too fantastic, horrifying, beautiful or unique for film to replicate – few movies can rise to that challenge as successfully as the written word.
What are some of your favorite and least favorite book-to-movie translations? And what makes the good ones work and the bad ones fail?
