But it says here ...

OPINION: They're making a film of Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road. Expectations are way, way up there because the book is mightily well regarded. And movie adaptations of his earlier works have turned out pretty well. No Country for Old Men won the best film Oscar, writes The Southland Times in an editorial.

When the Wall Street Journal asked McCarthy recently whether he retained oversight of the movie projects, he said no. It was now somebody else's project and you don't embroil yourself in that. "You sell it and you go home to bed."

New Zealand author Elizabeth Knox went to bed, too, but she did it tearfully, and for days, after seeing Niki Caro's film of her novel The Vintner's Luck, which has drawn unkind reviews from critics who haven't read the book; and worse ones from those who have.

Central to the book is a gay romance between her vintner and an angel. The film dispensed with this, rendering the angel just an adviser, and it introduced a dollop of heterosexual sex instead.

Knox's complaint that Caro abandoned what the book was actually about seems valid given that reviewers have been puzzled by the point of the movie.

Knox is entitled to her unhappiness. She's not the first writer to feel deeply hurt by the handling of her work, of course, and in this case the problem would not appear to be a case of thuddingly insensitive industry forces doing the damage. Rather, it was one where a different artist's interpretation disappointed. Caro, after all, is no hack. She has made films of depth and integrity in Whale Rider and North Country.

The risk was always there. Movie history is littered with failed adaptations, some of which have foundered because they did, indeed, debase the integrity of the source material. However, faithfulness is no guarantee of success either. Many a dutiful adaptation has come thudding to earth because it failed to make the imaginative leap to create something that worked on screen.

Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy is widely held to have honoured the J R R Tolkien stories, but the fact remains that he softened the ending, in which the hobbits were to have returned from their adventure to find their Shire home ravaged in their absence. By and large, not many people minded that, after all their torments, he'd let the little fellas off.

And now, with Jackson's adaptation of the splendid Alice Sebold novel The Lovely Bones coming to screen next month, we learn that an important scene was re-edited because preview audience feedback was strongly that they wanted to see the character suffer.

Jackson, can-do guy that he is, has duly re-edited to bang the falling figure against a few rocks.

Where's the harm in that, really? Well, encouraging though the other early indicators have been, this one concession to vengeance fantasy does smack, a little, of pandering at the expense of the story.

If we're correct in determining what her book's about, Sebold didn't overlook the potential to inflict suffering – she chose against it, and for good reason.

Still. Disney inflicted a happy end on The Hunchback of Notre Dame. There's a version of Animal Farm in which the critters rise up against their new pig overlords, and where the makers of the wretched adaptation of I Am Legend decided that Will Smith shouldn't, after all, discover that the dark creatures he'd been butchering were actually moral and that he was the one acting like a monster, we're entitled still to feel optimistic that Sebold's story is in safe hands.

And Knox lives to write another day.

Newest First

Oldest First