Archive | Book Matters

Given the number of period dramas churned out every year, it’s surprising how few are any good. Many are dull as dirt; many are bodice rippers with delusions of grandeur; and many take so many anachronistic liberties that you wonder why the filmmakers bothered at all. A new adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Victorian novel Far From the Madding Crowd seems a dismal prospect, then. Why try to top the deliciously hamstrung magic of the 1967 Julie Christie version? And how can modern Hollywood capture the glorious complexity of Bathsheba Everdeen, a 19th century literary heroine so legendarily independent that Suzanne Collins named the protagonist of The Hunger Games after her? (Granted, that’s not a selling point for everyone.)

I should have known director Thomas Vinterberg wouldn’t attach himself to anything trite. Originally known as one of the founders of Dogme 95, the avant-garde Danish film movement launched to eradicate big-studio pretensions, the director’s most acclaimed work from that era is “The Celebration”–a harrowing, deeply affecting portrait of a dysfunctional, well-to-do family. More recently he directed “The Hunt,” which boasts unusually rich visual and narrative detail as well as a preoccupation with the same themes that consume Hardy’s work: class politics, insular communities, and the grim unavoidability of fate. For a classic love story, “Far From the Madding Crowd” is awash in harsh realities only partly offset by the natural buoyancy of its protagonist. Continue Reading →

This month marks the 90th anniversary of the publication of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s hallowed classic about a self-made tycoon and his long-lost love. Like the green light famously tantalizing its protagonist, Gatsby has proven irresistible to filmmakers, who keep adapting it to the screen but never capture its allure. Why can’t cinema get this novel right? And, perhaps more intriguingly, why does it keep trying?

The answers may lie in the book itself. Published in 1925, it was initially deemed a failure, garnering mixed reviews and selling only 20,000 copies. Though now celebrated as The Great American Novel, it didn’t experience a resurgence until World War II, when it resonated with a nation clinging to its myths in the shadow of international threats. Fitzgerald himself was a bit like Jay Gatsby, dying in 1940 with a tarnished legacy that had to be restored by adherents not unlike narrator Nick Carraway. For that matter, the book itself–a reverie of furs, sleek cars, jazz, and prettily phrased quasi-revelations (reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope)–also could be described as a Jay Gatsby, a barrage of smoke and gilt-framed mirrors that buys so completely into its hype that we buy it as well. Excessive, earnest, and, yes, a tad hollow, Gatsby is a profoundly American story, with flaws–vanities as well as cardboard romances–that loom far larger on a big screen. But it is also the quintessential rags-to-riches tale, so it remains the stuff of which Hollywood dreams are made. Continue Reading →