You Ruined It! :: Movie Adaptations of Favorite Books, Redux

The other day, a friend of mine pointed me to a news story about Tom Cruise being considered to play Lee Child's itinerant vigilante, Jack Reacher.

The outcry from fans was immediate and vigorous. Reacher is an unstoppable 6' 5", 250 pound, package of whupass. Cruise, generally speaking, is not. Child is on on record with the Guardian, saying "Reacher's size in the books is a metaphor for an unstoppable force, which Cruise portrays in his own way," Nevertheless, the cry went up from the halls of fandom: "You're ruining it!"

Every so often, this discussion rears its head and I've discussed it before in relation to Harry Potter as well as Where the Wild Things Are and Inkheart. And I'm on record as saying that there's no manner in which a movie adaptation can "ruin" a book.  They can screw up a story, they can make a bad movie, but nothing they do can have any effect on the book they were (allegedly) based upon... or can it?

Here There Be Wild Things

One more Wild Things post and then I'll move on to other topics, I promise.

Something I forgot to mention (I was reminded by a friend on Facebook) is that the source material for the movie included more than just the Caldecott Award winning picture book. It also included the story Max at Sea by the masterful Dave Eggers, which he has since turned into a novel (which I cannot recommend because I haven't read it... yet). Eggers is credited as cowriter for the screenplay.

Of course, Mssr. Eggers is almost absurdly talented: not only has he contributed to The Onion, he co-founded McSweeney's and has won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer.  

You can read Max at Sea here at the New Yorker (click).

As is his habit, Eggers is astoundingly brilliant in the guise of a pre-adolescent boy. If you haven't read Egger's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius you don't know what I'm talking about, but you should and then you would. It's no wonder previous attempts at the movie failed, they didn't have Eggers on staff. Every movie should be so lucky.

Also also... yesterday, I mentioned that Lasseter took a stab at a cartoon of Where the Wild Things Are. It's on YouTube (linked below). Lasseter, of course, went on to Pixar where he probably produced or directed every movie the company ever made that you actually liked.

A boy pretending to be a wolf pretending to be a king

I loved Where the Wild Things Are. It was my favorite book as a child. Sendak, along with HA Rey, Richard Scarry and a little-known fellow named Charles Schultz were my earliest artistic muses. I spent hours and hours copying their works, trying to unlock their styles and create my own curious monkey, Busy Busy World, Wild Things island, and Peanuts Gang.

I've written extensively about how I feel about movie adaptations of beloved books. And though I approach any movie adaptation of a beloved book with trepidation, I stand by what I said back in July: "No matter how far afield a two hour Where the Wild Things Are movie takes a 48-page children's book, the impact that this seminal book had on my life won't be undone."

But this is Where the Wild Things Are.

A couple of years ago, I heard a great interview with Maurice Sendak. He mentioned all the attempts to get this book onto the screen that ultimately failed. Even John Lassiter of Pixar fame did a test version for Disney and they couldn't make it work. At forty-eight pages, but only nine sentences, Sendak left a lot of silence for us to interpret the book for ourselves. And the interpretations have been diverse.

There have been many who thought it inappropriate for children, that it somehow condoned acting-up and being a wild thing. Sendak was amused by this interpretation. Most people don't get that the story this book tells - mostly in pantomime - is that even after this kid has been a little monster throughout the entire book, his mom brought him dinner anyway. Even though moms yell and send them to their room and might even get mad and punish, etcetera. Sendak thought it was an important lesson for children that yes they need to behave, but even when they're at their worst, their moms still love them. At the end they're still a family.

The movie is made by a man who "got it" and written by someone else who "got it", the incomparable Dave Eggars. It holds tightly to Sendak's themes. It doesn't change Max. It doesn't change the Wild Things. It doesn't water down the raw intensity of what it is to be a boy at a certain time in life.  It fleshes out Sendak's pantomime. It keeps the dangerous edge that the book had, this little boy pretending to be a wolf, pretending to be a king.

If you've read the book I feel that I cannot really spoil this movie for you. But SPOILER ALERT nonetheless because there are details below.

Spike Jonez gave the movie a modernist, hyper-real look that's hard to describe. There's a documentary air about it, with lot of handheld-cameras. The lighting is realistic, not glossy. Natural lighting without the Hollywood gloss. Jim Henson's creature workshop built the Wild Things, so they're on set and the boy is obviously interacting with physical specimens. The CG special effects are constrained to the faces and some of the super-human jumps and the like. They remain supportive of the story rather than overpowering them.

Max is a little monster, but he's really just a little boy looking for control over something. Anything.

His sojourn among the Wild Things has a vision quest feel to it. He's journeying inward and there is danger there, his hold on them as their king is tenuous at all times and you feel it. Every scene reflects his inner chaos and his relations with his family. Each Wild Thing is a facet of the boy's personality with the most dangerous and mercurial of the lot, Carol, masterfully brought to life by the actor in the suit (as are all the monsters) and the voice of James Gandolfini. Underlining the metaphor is that Max holds sway over the wild things by his fingernails. He can guide them, he can cajol them, he can sometimes get therm to expend their efforts in creative and wonderful ways, but he ultimately only controls them by the barest margin. At all times there's the threat that he'll lose control and they'll consume him.

Jonez brings the sense and sensibilities of a real kid. Throughout the movie you can feel Sendak moving behind the scenes. This movie is the book and it's not. It's everything the book was, plus. It's ultimately a tale of a kid who lives mostly inside his head, with few friends and an older sister who is taking the first steps into adulthood, down a path that young Max isn't ready to follow. She is leaving behind a younger brother who is feeling the sundering of what you get the impression was a close relationship at some point, lost playmates spinning apart in a family that's spinning apart in the wake of the loss of his father.

But Jonez lets you infer a lot from very little and I found it very artfully done. The parts of the movie that take place outside Max's external world are few and just enough to let you see the glory and tragedy of being a little boy. Max Record, the boy who plays Max is fantastic. He carries off the role of a boy who simultaneously hates what's happening to him and around him and hates his lack of control over himself and the events that shape him. His beleaguered mother is brought to life in few short scenes and artfully so. A woman trying to raise two kids, hold down a job and find a life and happiness for herself.

In the contractual terms of any vision quest, there is self-awareness dawning slowly throughout the movie. Max grows up a little, realizes the tightrope he walks, but not all things can be resolved. Not every side of him will suffer the bit and bridle. And Max attains some understanding of himself, of his family, of his creativity, of his ability or lack thereof to contain and control his monsters. And in the end he has to get in his little boat and come back. Mom gives him a hot meal and they are a family, Wild Things and all.

Is this a kid's movie or a movie about a kid? I don't know. I don't have a kid. The child Scottie would love this movie, though. He wouldn't catch all the undercurrents or the metaphors, but it's the right kind of scary and the good kind of dark to trip the same triggers that Labyrinth found when I was my nephews' age. Kids movies don't have to be happy. The best among them have multiple threads that give the kids something and their parents something and then the kids something to come back to and find when they see them again with their kids. I think Where the Wild Things Are aspires to the latter realm. And it's not for me to say whether or not it attains it. But as a boy who has been a wolf, a king and a wild thing, I loved it for it similarities to the book as well as its differences.

You Ruined It!

Hollywood is chock full of milquetoast renditions of great books. I just read a thoughtful comparison between the movie Inkheart and the book by Cornelia Funke upon which it was based over at the book blog We Be Reading (the movie - though enjoyable - varies drastically in character and tone from the book). It was all handled delicately and she was most gentle when discussing the variance between the two, but it stoked a mental fire that I've been tending for quite some time.

What I appreciated most about Kristen's assessment of the two (book and movie) is that she never once implied that the one destroyed the other. Last night I watched the new Harry Potter movie and came home to finally read the reviews without fear of spoilers (though reading the books was spoiler enough, I suppose) and was surprised at the number of fans taking it to task for varying too much from JK Rowling's story and "ruining the book".

Yes things were deleted. And things were added. And people were shuffled. Can't say I minded much. And it certainly didn't ruin the book.

That's a complaint I hear and read a lot and I can't say I understand it. The list of books I've heard fans complain of being "ruined" by their filmic translation is seemingly endless and ranges wildly from James Bond to James and the Giant Peach. The popularity or critical success of the movie seems to stand somewhat apart from the reaction of the dedicated fans.

I have to admit that upon hearing that one of my favorite books will be set to film, I too sometimes find my teeth grinding. Why is that? No matter how far afield a two hour Where the Wild Things Are movie takes a 48-page children's book, the impact that this seminal book had on my life won't be undone. So why do we care so much?  

Bladerunner was an excellent movie that never got anywhere near Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Watchmen was simultaneously praised and lambasted for its adherence to Allan Moore's graphic novel. Yet classics by Dickens, Austen and God-knows Sir Arthur Conan Doyle have been endlessly made and remade without the pantheon of English Literature spiraling into oblivion... So why does my hair stand on end when I hear that a Neuromancer movie is in the works? It can't really "ruin" the book. Can it?

There are certainly movies I've seen that made me slink out of the movie theater wishing for a trick of Space & Time to allow me to go back and regain the hours lost. (A good argument for investing heavily in time travel research). And I'm sure many of them were based upon books, sometimes a mite too loosely. But did the 2002 adaptation of The Time Machine alter my perception of the HG Wells story? No. At most it ran afoul of the wholly-imaginary movie I've spent the last thirty years casting and re-casting in my head. Is that what's really being 'ruined' by these film adaptations? That's not really the same as ruining a book, is it?

I've been told by some that the mental impression left by film is stronger than the impression left by text. And while sounds somewhat plausible in our remarkably visually-oriented society, there's at least one interesting scientific study that seems to indicate that the reaction to scenes on the screen and on the page are essentially the same. If you follow that link above, you'll find a WIRED article about the scientists who determined that "what's disgusting on the screen is just as disgusting described in a book" -- ultimately the brain doesn't care if it's seeing it on the silver screen or imagining it from a passage of text. Is this the neural chemistry that's hampering the ability of some to differentiate between the movieplex and the bookstore? Is the image flickering on the screen overwriting the memories of the original story? Not for me.

My problem is that the idea implies that there isn't room on my mental bookshelf for the filmic adaptation of Coraline and the Neil Gaiman book despite the similarities and differences between the two. In the current climate books are transforming from ink on a page (or at least only ink on a page) to a picture on a screen, whether we're closing the gap between the two or they are already on the verge of overlapping is a bit of a debate.

For the nonce, I think that it behooves us to remember each for its charms, quirks and merits. Revel in the quiet elegance of the inner dialogue only possible in print, in the images that flicker behind our eyes as we doze off with a beloved book on our chests and don't confuse it with the communal event found in the darkness of a movie theater.

Make a movie. Write a book. Adapt one into the other. Heck, re-imagine Mystic River as a Broadway Musical. There is too much to enjoy (or revile) in any one format that I cannot help but regard each as a separate entity to be praised or damned on its own merits. The movie sits beside the book on my shelf rather than replacing it... or ruining it.