Adapting Atonement

In today's London Times director Ken Russell alerts us to the forthcoming release of the film version of Ian McEwan's Atonement.  Russell reminds us that literary adaptations are hit or miss propositions.  In fact, they're more likely to go wrong than right.  Atonement, though, should do okay.  McEwan has enjoyed a good track record of film adaptations, and the team of scriptwriter Christopher Hampton (the great Dangerous Liaisons) and director Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice) seem well-suited to deliver a heritage film with an edge.

But we should be prepared to be disappointed.  "There’s no formula and no guarantee," Russell says of film adaptations of well-known novels.  This is because film and literature are fundamentally irreconcilable mediums.  "A book we 'hear', listening to our own reading. A movie we see'." This isn't a particularly good way to distinguish between the two mediums, but we get his point. What works on the page doesn't necessarily work on the screen.  Russell locates the difficulty in the difference between the filmic image and the novelistic image.  This may explain why so-called "literary" novels are so tricky to adapt: their discourse tends to be internalized, so symbols and images are more likely to reflect inner states of mind than objects of perception.  Russell even points out that films tend to do better when dealing with "altered states," when interior images overwhelm the external world.

Really, it shouldn't surprise us that it's harder to make a film adaptation of a literary novel than it is a genre novel.  It's harder to read a literary novel.  But I think that focusing on differences of narrative discourse--films are visual, novels are verbal--is the wrong place to locate the difficulty of adapting novels into films. Ever since Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of Mario Puzo's pulp fiction classic The Godfather, it's been a truism in Hollywood that bad novels make good films.  Genre novels tend to be big, fat beasts with lots of action spread out over 600 or 700 pages.  Films, on the other hand, pretty much have to take care of their business in two hours, so they take all of that action and compress it into a neat little 120-minute story.  There are two consequences to this approach.  First is that the actions zips along nicely from highlight to highlight.  Forget the languors of The English Patient. Second, the compressed storyline leads to a highly melodramatic narrative.  Melodrama has lots of characteristics, but one of the most important is the roller coaster effect of success and failure, happiness and sadness, action and nonaction. The sudden reversals of the melodramatic narrative can be emotionally engaging -- and most Hollywood films are melodramatic -- but they can also seem one-dimensional because the pleasure of the text is so concentrated in one effect.

Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings fans miss the point when they complain about crucial details of the novels are left out of the films.  Plot distortions are essential to successful adaptations.  Generally speaking, the most successful adaptations are those that recognize the differences in melodramatic intensity between film and the novel. We don't think of McEwan as a particularly melodramatic writer, but the outlines of a melodramatic narrative are certainly present in his novels, for the sudden reversal is among his favorite narrative effects.

Comments

[Internet Solutions India]

McEwan sure is not melodramatic but sad that he is portrayed so...

[Richard Prouty]

Yes, you're right about McEwan not being melodramatic in any explicit sense, but I don't think his fiction would be so amenable to film adaptations if there weren't melodramatic elements in it. I'm thinking, for instance, of his novel Saturday in which the happy home life of the main character is disrupted at regular intervals by menacing glimpses of the thugs who will eventually strike in an explicitly melodramatic confrontation at the novel's conclusion.

By the way, I don't mean "melodramatic" in a pejorative sense. Rather, I was referring to melodrama merely as a formal principle.