Andy Serkis Makes a Pig’s Ear of George Orwell With His New Infantile Hollywood Adaptation of ‘Animal Farm’

George Orwell’s allegorical 1945 novella “Animal Farm” — famously described as “A Fable” upon publication — was notoriously rejected for publication by T.S. Eliot at his publishing firm of Faber and Faber. Although Eliot respected Orwell’s talent, not only had the writer never had any notable commercial success up to that point — admittedly a less pressing consideration in those less cutthroat days — but he also deplored the novel’s anti-Stalinist political message.Eliot himself was no left-winger but he was unconvinced that Orwell was less offering a solution so much as mourning a situation. He wrote to him, “I think my own dissatisfaction with this apologue is that the effect is simply one of negation. It ought to excite some sympathy with what the author wants, as well as sympathy with his objections to something: and the positive point of view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincing.” He concluded, in a line that has become notorious, “after all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm – in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.”Watching Andy Serkis’s new animated adaptation of “Animal Farm” it was tempting, all over again, to think that what this well-worn story needed was something, whether that was more Communism, more public-spirited pigs or simply some cinematic chutzpah that gave it a pressing reason for existing. It is clearly a labor of love for Mr. Serkis, who has been involved with the project in some form or another since 2011, but the trouble with labors of love is that they often come unstuck. So it has proved here, rather spectacularly. It would take more space than I have here to describe what has gone awry, but the inclusion of a new character, a cute piglet named “Lucky” is the first major misstep, with the second being the voice casting of the perennially affable and warm Seth Rogen as the dictatorial “Napoleon.”It is, to put it mildly, incongruous, but if this was the film’s only swing-and-miss, then it might be bearable, even forgivable. Yet there are more issues here. Mr. Serkis clearly isn’t interested in making a faithful adaptation of Orwell’s story, aided or perhaps abetted by a dismal script from Nicholas Stoller, the man responsible for “Get Him to the Greek,” now one of the most problematic films ever made thanks to its casting of Russell Brand and Sean Combs — that takes away the political allegory inherent in the original and replaces it with a rote attack on big business and corporations, epitomized by a Glenn Close-voiced character named Frieda Pilkington, who declares that the farm is “the last piece of land I don’t own.”There are fart jokes added in and clearly someone thought at some point that Lucky might make for a merchandisable character, which makes for a strange incongruity; I cannot imagine any audience leaving the average Orwell adaptation and thinking that they should go onto Amazon to buy a cute piglet toy. The film is 94 miserable minutes long, each one of them devoid of wit, originality or any particular point. It has been critically mocked in Orwell’s native Britain already when it premiered last year at the London Film Festival, and it seems inevitable that poor reviews will follow here, too. Every one of them is deserved.Orwell has not had the best run of screen adaptations. Apart from Michael Radford’s chilly, grim version of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” with an excellent central performance by John Hurt as the reluctant rebel Winston Smith and Richard Burton’s final appearance in cinema as his tormentor O’Brien, it is hard to think of any picture that has done justice to his work.There’s a middling Richard E. Grant-Helena Bonham Carter version of Orwell’s autobiographical “Keep the Aspidistra Flying,” a couple of undistinguished earlier takes on “Animal Farm” and numerous documentaries that take his word as gospel, of which the recent Raoul Peck-directed “2 + 2 = 5” was the most recent example. Yet this is of a piece with an increasingly loose political ideology that means that Orwell’s writing can appeal to those on the left, right or somewhere in between. More than a century after he was born, this Old Etonian would probably be amused, rather than horrified, that he has become all things to all men, and, on the basis of the new “Animal Farm,” to all filmmakers, too.There is undoubtedly something to be said for bold and loose adaptations of Orwell’s writing. If someone like Paul Thomas Anderson or Steven Soderbergh took his “Down and Out in Paris and London” and turned it into an adrenaline-fueled picaresque comedy of a man on his uppers — “Uncut Gems” with restaurants — then it might be a fascinating picture. Orwell himself, who worked for a while as a film critic for the long extinct Time and Tide magazine, was certainly interested enough in the relatively new medium, although after he died, his widow Sonia Brownell ensured that few adaptations of his work were permitted for a long time, most notably forbidding a disgruntled David Bowie to turn “Nineteen Eighty-Four” into a musical. The result, “Diamond Dogs,” made for one of his greatest albums, suggesting that sometimes compromise leads to genius.Alas the same cannot be said of Mr. Serkis’s film. He will soon be returning to Tolkien and the role that made him a household name, Gollum, in a new picture drawn from previously unfilmed material, “The Hunt for Gollum.” Mr Serkis will also be directing the film — presumably as a sweetener to convince him to reprise this role yet again — and it will undoubtedly be a big hit. But let us hope, with all that is holy, that it does a better job for Tolkien’s legacy than this travesty does for Orwell’s. It is enough to make you wish that Eliot’s word had been final and that this particular sow had never whelped.

Andy Serkis Makes a Pig’s Ear of George Orwell With His New Infantile Hollywood Adaptation of ‘Animal Farm’

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