By the Book

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

From the number of winter movies raiding bookshelves for source material this year, you’d think the ongoing Hollywood writers’ strike had started sometime last spring and sent producers running for ready-made scripts. True, the holiday slate annually harbors a slew of attention-courting literary adaptations, installed on screens with a flourish as predictable as Christmas decorations going up. But this season’s bumper crop and its grating lows (and stirring highs) only underline the ways these aspirational attempts tend to fall short as freestanding works of art, much less entertainment. Considering the writers, you’d think we’d have on our hands the greatest season of cinema in history. This week, it’s “Kite Runner,” which Paramount Vantage and director Marc Forster have adapted from the best-selling novel by Khaled Hosseini, that rolls into theaters, alongside Francis Ford Coppola’s”Youth Without Youth,” which is taken from the novella by the Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade. These follow on the heels of “No Country for Old Men” (Cormac McCarthy), “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (Jean-Dominique Bauby), “Into the Wild” (Jon Krakauer), and “Atonement” (Ian McEwan), all of which have found places on critics’ year-end award lists, as have the forthcoming “There Will Be Blood,” from Sinclair Lewis’s “Oil!,” and “Charlie Wilson’s War,” from the book by George Crile. “Love in the Time of Cholera” (Gabriel García Márquez) was a critical disappointment, but Francis Lawrence’s “I Am Legend,” which opens this weekend, taken from Richard Matheson’s choice bit of 1954 science fiction pulp, and Chris Weitz’s “The Golden Compass,” originally Philip Pullman’s controversial religion-tinged novel, are both blockbusters.

Of these, “Kite Runner,” which tracks a class-crossing boyhood friendship in Soviet-era Afghanistan, might be the worst, but it bears valuable lessons. For one thing, the hackneyed, bland drama reaffirms that the industry’s chief interest is an adaptation’s built-in audience of readers and name recognizers. While Hollywood’s hunger for safe bets is not news, the middling exotica and McDaptation streamlining of “The Kite Runner” feel especially perverse for a book whose groundswell popularity expressed an inspiring interest in the far-off lands dominating TV news.

Instead of respecting the individuality of the material, filmmakers such as Mr. Forster essentially aim for simulating and prepackaging the literary experience in tinselly wonder. In other words: Hoist that metaphor or motif high! And so Mr. Forster’s adaptation devotes interminable stretches to Amir (Khalid Abdalla) and his boy-servant pal Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada) racing kites over Kabul — carefree, but not for long … The sky-level shots of their dogfights integrate computer-generated images so poorly that they look empty and unfinished, betraying the reality that there really is no there there.

Spotlighting a device such as this one amounts to an unintentional parody of literary language, and a concerted exoticism about reading as an adventure or mystery. Even Mr. Coppola, in this weekend’s other dramatic adaptation, cannot resist pegging his film to the roses that crop up in Eliade’s original book, part of the director’s weakness for romanticizing. He also expands the protagonist’s doppelganger, which appears infrequently in the book, in order to goose his film’s story and psychological intrigue: In a sense, making Tim Roth, grimacing madly in this devil’s-advocate supplement to his main role, “act out” the novel.

But sometimes the exoticism is the more familiar sort attached to foreign lands — whether too much or too little. “Epcot Center,” offered one critic of the honey-lit and stage-managed streets of “The Kite Runner,” in which a gang of children rounds corners on cue in un-childlike unison. (The wrenching sagas surrounding the child actor playing Hassan, whose family feared ostracism and worse for his performing in the film, tellingly overshadow reality in “Kite.”)

By contrast, the autobiographical, animated “Persepolis,” whose graphic novel source was another empathetic bridge builder to a geopolitical hotspot (this time Iran), errs on the other side. Author Marjane Satrapi, who co-directed the film, sands down the rougher edges and wilder contradictions from her teenage self, but makes sure to expand the low-comic gag of a toothy landlord’s incontinent dog.

Few would expect more from Mr. Forster, who has shown a tendency to pander in films such as “Finding Neverland” and “Monster’s Ball,” and that brings up the vulnerability of novels to filmmakers’ personal projects. Something about the knotty potentials on the page opens up irresistible canvases in the auteur-minded. This fall’s “Into the Wild,” for example, heaves with sanctimony all too familiar from Sean Penn when he’s not safely acting. (“I have zero desire to watch Sean Penn ‘appreciating’ the American West,” said a friend.) Even Ben Affleck’s simple but effective debut behind the camera, “Gone Baby Gone” (from the novel by Dennis Lehane), can still be overcautious and sloppy at the same time (as well as an example of homegrown exoticism in its foul-mouthed South Boston eruptions).

But, lest the future of the book on-screen sound bleak, the temptations of “doing” this or that title can also bring out the best in filmmakers. For every “Kite Runner” that climaxes with a bourgeois rescue mission into the Taliban’s secret sanctum, there’s a perfectly respectable effort such as Mr. Schnabel’s “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” which offers no butterfly cam, no mawkishness, and meaningful plays on character perspective. One shudders to think of the result if Johnny Depp had been cast, as was once rumored.

And the existence of the anemic “Love in the Time of Cholera,” in which Mike Newell summons all the passion and desire of “Enchanted April,” can be forgotten instantly in front of the likes of “No Country for Old Men.” Even if the Coen Brothers do not entirely pull off a fine-grained, integrated portrait of Texan souls and grotesques, they reimagine Mr. McCarthy’s novel (and prose) vividly and intelligently.

And for every four or five or 10 adaptations, there is one “There Will Be Blood.” Lest the filmmaking weaknesses described here sound too fussily loyal to the independent life of novels, the excellence of Paul Thomas Anderson’s work, which makes its premiere on December 26, reminds us what real success probably means: namely, not even leaving space in our minds to remember whether or not it was originally a book.


The New York Sun

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