This is part 1 of Benjamin Rybeck’s coverage of the Best Adapted Screenplay nominees at the 86th Academy Awards. Full spoilers follow.
The Magus. The Scarlet Letter. The Sound and the Fury. Tropic of Cancer. Ulysses. Do you remember those films, such rickety things, devoid of psychological depth and stylistic complexity—do you remember them?
What about recent adaptations of acclaimed contemporary novels, like Blindness, or The Shipping News, or Labor Day? What do you remember about those films? Peach pie? Okay. What else?
What about the movie versions of “book club” novels with which you have formed personal connections? Was it satisfying to see somebody else’s version of White Oleander, or did you prefer to imagine the characters on your own?
Sometimes you hear people say, “The book is always better than the movie.” In the aforementioned cases, I concede that, yes, the books are probably better than the movies.
But what about all the other cases?
Sometimes filmmakers tackle great work and fall short with honor (like Jonathan Demme’s impressively bonkers but incoherent adaptation of Beloved), or they tackle lesser work by great writers (in 2007, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood were adapted from non-canonical novels by Cormac McCarthy and Upton Sinclair, respectively). And sometimes, albeit rarely, the efforts more or less equal each other, as in The Grapes of Wrath, The Magnificent Ambersons—or, recently, Away from Her, Brokeback Mountain, and Little Children.
More often, however, film adaptations cast long shadows, and you would be excused for forgetting that Children of Men, The Descendants, Sideways, Silver Linings Playbook, and Up in the Air were originally novels. In fact, looking over the past decade’s nominees for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, I propose the following list of source materials that are of obviously greater aesthetic and/or historical importance than their cinematic counterparts: Atonement, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Doubt, The Motorcycle Diaries, Notes on a Scandal, and Seabiscuit—in other words, six of 50 nominated films.
Often, film people option books not for aesthetics but for stories. Therefore, it’s no surprise that nonfiction is so popular. When producers option books like The Accidental Billionaires (adapted into The Social Network), Between a Rock and a Hard Place (adapted into 127 Hours—and yes, that’s seriously the book’s title), The Master of Disguise (adapted into Argo), or Moneyball, they purchase not so much the right to adapt the book as they purchase the right to adapt the story, and therein can lie a vast difference.
Of the 2014 Best Adapted Screenplay nominees, three of the source materials—A Captain’s Duty, The Lost Child of Philomena Lee, and The Wolf of Wall Street—were likely optioned in galleys, or shortly after publication, on the strength of story alone. (In A Captain’s Duty, the Phillips family even jokes about who will play Captain Phillips in the film adaptation.) Twelve Years a Slave—the source material for the fourth nominated film—was discovered by filmmakers who had wanted to make a film about slavery for years. These are works of nonfiction whose merits are experiential, not aesthetic. In other words, you read Twelve Years a Slave for its presentation of a historical moment and its portrait of courage, not for its poetic language.
The fifth and final nominee is Before Midnight, Richard Linklater’s third film about Celine and Jesse, which takes place 18 years after those lovers first met in Vienna. This is an original work, its inclusion among adapted screenplays a technicality: Kim Krizan co-created the characters in Before Sunrise; thus, Before midnight is nominally adapted.
(I have little to say about Before Midnight in the context of this article, except that it is the high point of one of cinema’s noblest endeavors. The other projects that have paid such attention to the span of human life—and have tried to portray it in something approximating real time—are few: The Up documentaries, of course, and Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage/Saraband, but also Satyajit Ray’s trilogy of Apu films—though the timeframe of his productions was much shorter— and even The Godfather trilogy.)
The other four nominees for Best Adapted Screenplay are Captain Phillips, Philomena, 12 Years a Slave, and The Wolf of Wall Street; the winner will be revealed on March 2nd, at the 86th Academy Awards ceremony. Throughout this coming week, I will write about one of these films per day, starting with The Wolf of Wall Street tomorrow.
I have no idea whether these films accurately portray real events (in some cases, I doubt the veracity of the “nonfiction” books themselves), but journalistic inquiry isn’t my goal. Instead, I will draw out the narrative and thematic choices that the filmmakers made in each adaptation, and I will offer some thoughts about why they made those choices.
These books are not “better” than their films. Rather, each film is in conversation with its source, and both participants are enriched in the process.