Tom Tykwer swears he doesn’t “just walk around reading books in hopes of finding new material.” Given the director’s screenwriting chops (“Run Lola Run,” “3”), it seems a legitimate claim, and yet he does possess a knack for literary adaptations. In his takes on everything from David Mitchell’s millennium-spawning meta-novel “Cloud Atlas” to Patrick Süskind’s period-film explosion “Perfume,” Tykwer has managed to adapt what has largely been considered unfit for screen. (No less than Stanley Kubrick declared “Perfume” unadaptable.) Most recently he has tackled A Hologram for the King, Dave Eggers’s post-financial crisis novel about an American businessman adrift in a Mideast desert. As fish-out-of-water as tales ever go, it’s a surprisingly pleasurable effort that suggests Tykwer may be cinema’s new adaptation king – though he still lurks relatively under the radar. Continue Reading →
Archive | Reviews
‘Maggie’s Plan’ Does Not Go Astray
“Maggie’s Plan” is that rarest of ensemble films about attractive, overly educated New Yorkers (and that is a cinema genre unto itself): It doesn’t seem like a poor man’s Woody Allen. This may be because writer, director, novelist and painter Rebecca Miller knows something about emerging from a long shadow– her father is Arthur Miller and her husband is Daniel Day Lewis. I prefer to think, though, that it’s because she has a genuine fondness for humans in all their folly, which is a far cry from the latent misanthropy lurking in the works of such ostensible crowd-pleasers as Noah Baumbach, Nora Ephron, Nicole Holofcener, and, yes, Mr. Allen. Continue Reading →
‘Love & Friendship’ & Fangs
Whit Stillman is not exactly a literary adaptation sort. From “Metropolitan,” his 1990 directorial debut, he has worked from arch screenplays of his own devise – wholly original amalgams of doctoral theses, oddly formal courtships, and high-low banter. In fact, he may be one of the only helmers on the block who has written novels based on his own films; I especially like his Barcelona and Metropolitan: Tales of Two Cities.
But Jane Austen has always threaded through his films. In “Metropolitan” especially, her influence is laid bare; in it, fuddy-duddy Manhattan debutantes gravely discuss Pride & Prejudice in lieu of their feelings for each other. Now in “Love & Friendship,” he’s called his own bluff by adapting Lady Austen or, rather, Lady Susan, the eighteenth-century author’s first and least beloved effort. Lest Stillman seem impertinent for renaming it, Austen never named her novella in the first place, and this new title almost seems an endeavor to grant Susan the status of her other books. Still, it’s toothless, the one off note of this otherwise very pleasurable film. Continue Reading →