I recently saw a trailer for a movie going by the title The Three Musketeers. It
brought to mind a book that went by the same name I had heard of in my youth,
and I suspected they might be in some way related. After some research I found
that the movie, like the book, appears to take place in seventeenth century
France. Its main characters are named d’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. There
was a ninja, but this is being billed as an action movie and I am not ones to
split hairs. The whole shebang unraveled quickly on the arrival of flying
zeppelin warships. Alexandre Dumas’s original was full of intrigue, romance,
sex, and action. It was also very long. It would not be hard to make a movie
based on Dumas’s The Three Musketeers that cuts a lot of the politics, plays up the action—even with some Guy Richie
style fight scenes—and still stays pretty true to the novel. Instead we are
treated to some terrible conflagration fueled by equal parts steampunk, Michael
Bay, and last night’s undercooked, reheated Taco Bell.
It seems to happen more and more that Hollywood is hijacking
the reputations of literature’s greatest works. Now I am certainly no literary
purist. I have no innate problem with movies based on books. I do believe,
however, that there should be some connection to the source material. You would
be upset if you went to a “hockey” game and found a bunch of guys throwing a
round orange ball at a hoop ten feet off the ground, you would be appalled if Iron Man 2 was a romantic, and you
should be horrified if any of your favorite books winds up in the hands of this
man. So consider this article fair warning—though most of these wear their
misdeeds like a giant foam finger—the following movies are based on nothing but
the screenplay. Some are good movie, many are bad, but they display a complete
disregard for the works on which they are “based”.
Gulliver’s Travels starring Jack Black
This is frustrating because Gulliver’s Travels has been considered a children’s book in
previous ages. This is had a lot to do with the nonsensical names and
absolutely nothing to do with Jack Black in a dress. Of course anyone with even
a cursory knowledge of Jonathan Swift’s works knows him as an astute observer
of the British Kingdoms in the eighteenth century. In Gulliver’s Travels uses humor to expose the evils he see is the
world around him, including war, poverty, and travel writing, while also
considering such mature and weighty topics such as the nature of government, the relationship between
man and reason, and religion in society. In 2010 Twentieth Century Fox turned
it into a slap-stick comedy starring Jack Black.
It is not just that the movie has been moved to modern day
America or the casting of Jack Black—who has actually been in a good adaptation of a book—but
the reduction of a smart satire to dumb comedy that proves most offensive in
this movie. Scenes from the book are turned completely upside down. In both
versions he arrives on the island of Lilliput, the inhabitants of which are
one-twelfth the size of a full grown human. In the book, Gulliver cleverly
steals the Navy of their enemies but finds himself on increasingly poor terms
with the Lilliputians due to his unwillingness to slaughter their enemies and
his attempt to save the palace by urinating on it. His actions did save the
palace but in doing so he broke a law which prohibited the “passing of water”
in the palace and offended the Empress. In the movie, the wacky peeing scene
gets Gulliver praised as a hero. Unlike the Gulliver in the novel, Jack Black
fought off their enemies, not through cleverness but with his giant gut, which
proved invulnerable to their cannonballs. The movie Gulliver eventually finds
himself banished from the island, except this time it is because he is beaten
by a giant robot and forced to admit to his lies about his life in America.
After becoming a doll there is a rescue and he proves himself to be a hero…or
something like that. There is no examination of culture or government, there is
no treatment of logic and reason, there is only wacky misunderstandings and
simplistic humor.
If you want to bring your children to a movie featuring some
literary merit or educational content I would recommend The Wizard of Oz, The Great Gatsby, or Star Wars. If you want something with a lot of effects to get them
to sit still for two hours, this works. If the names were changed and this
movie released under a different title, no one in their right mind would
compare it to Gulliver’s Travels, but what’s integrity when you have name recognition?
Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland
Tim Burton took the opposite route for his adaptation of
Lewis Carroll’s famous novels, taking what is ostensibly a children’s story and
changing it to appeal to an older crowd…and still somehow dumbing it down. When
Tim Burton came on the scene in the late eighties his works were fresh and
original, see Beetlejuice. In Batman his vision gave some fresh life
to an old character. Twenty years later, his style has not changed, although
the humor has all but disappeared. Instead he has put his quirky, goth stamp on
every marketable brand available from Planet
of the Apes (yup, a monkey head on the Lincoln Memorial) to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to Sleepy Hollow. That Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a veritable Rorschach test for
the “misunderstood artists” of each generation, wound up on his resume is a
testament to how tired for ideas the industry is getting.
The story behind the story started in 1862 when Charles
Lutwidge Dodgson is out with Alice Liddell and her sister, the young daughters
of a colleague, and decides to tell them a story. He took the next couple years
to flush it out into a novel, at least nominally for the little girl who was
immortalized in the title character, but also for publication. He also wrote a
sequel, Through the Looking Glass, that brought a slightly older Alice back into a nonsensical dream world. Both were
written for, and enjoyed by, children—he did make references to advanced mathematics,
as well as structuring the plot of Through
the Looking Glass on a chess game but while they were obviously meant to
catch the eye of adult readers, they do not encumber the plot or drag it down
with weighty, mature themes. Despite being a children’s novel and reveling in
the absurd, Carroll’s work is original and entertaining. It appealed to the
wacky and carefree spirit of children a century before the appearance of one
Dr. Theodore Seuss Geisel and his hat-wearing cat.
For what reason, I do not know, but for the last half
century American’s have been trying to ruin the sweet innocence of Alice’s
story. The first to distort Alice to their own way of seeing the world was the
hippies, who re-imagined the whole thing as a drug allegory. Because if there
is one thing that hippies love most, it is drug allegories…and drugs. Then,
some wind from hell brought the unimpeachable staff at Disney together with Tim Burton and made Alice
a bride-to-be, with all the emotional baggage that entails, and put her in a
strange world. The difference between strange and nonsensical is subtle, but
important. Nonsensical is pretty much self-explanatory. The rules of our world
are no longer applicable, things act in ways that they should not, things
appear in odd manifestations, and even words do not have to be limited to their
normal construction. Tim Burton’s version is strange, in that it inherits all
his stylistic quirks—odd looking plants, dark pinks and purples, Johnny Depp in
makeup, etc—but boiled down it is a pretty standard adventure story with Tim
Burton colored coating. It lacks the dissociation with reality that made the
originals so charming and sticks largely to the standard Hollywood model for
screenplays. Yet it currently stands as the ninth
highest grossing film of all time.
Dr. Seuss
Theodore Seuss Geisel is one of the most revered names in
children’s literature. The National Education Association holds Read Across America Day annually “on
or near March 2” which, by no mere coincidence, happens to be Dr. Seuss’s
birthday. His books are almost as popular as a Tim Burton movie and have become
icons for literacy programs and early education. They demonstrate the
continuing power of the written word in an age of constant visual stimulation. What
better way to honor this champion of the codex, this hero of the hardcover,
this Premier of the Printed Page, than to adapt his stories into big budget
Hollywood movies? And who better to represent them on the idiot box than Austin
Powers and Ace Ventura?
The Cat in the Hat was written as a school primer, introducing the basic words and sentences that
children are expected to know. Its conceit lies in the limiting of the
vocabulary to a list of 348 words every six
year old should know—for the most part, there were thirteen words were used
that were not on the list—and limiting the total vocabulary of the book to less
than 225 words—he used 223. The movie,
was…a movie. It included asides, jokes aimed at the parents, and all manner of
additional nonsense was included to balloon this bomb to a two hour feature
film.
How the Grinch Stole Christmas starring the rubber-faced Jim Carrey is the first of the recent
rash of Dr. Seuss film adaptations. Generally, it was viewed more favorably than
The Cat in the Hat but demonstrates some of the same problems. It does make my arguments more convincing if the
movie is done poorly, but the principles remain the same, especially how it
treats the story. The Grinch, was just that, a grinch, he did and said grinch
things and passed his days grinching. Jim Carrey was an over the top clown that
dominated the story. Special effects, humor, it’s the same story, and one
likely to be repeated next year with the Lorax.
There was no way these movies could live up to the promise
of the original stories. The Cat in the Hat and How the Grinch Stole
Christmas succeeded, and live on today because Dr. Seuss’s writing was
unique and inventive and because it encouraged children to use their
imagination. The movies could only try to emulate that voice in a longer format
bound to destroy it. And movies are, of course, the enemy of imagination. The
magic of what the human mind could conjure is replaced by the prepackaged
images, ready for merchandising and DVD’s so you can plant your kid down to
watch the flashing lights for another two hours.
Sherlock Holmes by Guy Richie
What happens when you mix Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s genius
sleuth with late twentieth century alcoholic narcissist? House M.D. But what if you add in some unnecessary steampunk and
bucket loads of action and CGI? Well then you have a Sherlock Holmes reboot.
Step 2: bring in a sexy cool director and an alcoholic narcissist to play the
role, lose any remnant of Victorian behavior or period sensibility and call it
a day. Doyle and his creation are giants in the world of mystery writing,
affecting everyone that has tried their hand at the genre since. I mention House because it is a much better reboot
for the character. Though it plays up the social aspects House is much more interested in the mystery and the process that were
front and center in the Doyle originals. Guy Ritchie’s version does actual have
a pretty cool mystery but watching the 2009 movie for the intriguing plot is
like getting Playboy for the articles, it is clearly not major
attraction and no one is going to believe you anyway.
All this is not to say I have anything against the movies. I
actually enjoyed Sherlock Holmes and
I could likely do a list of my favorite film adaptations (Lethal Weapon 5 was based on a novel, right?). However an
adaptation should be just that, take a book and represent it as best you can
through a different medium. Changes are inevitable, but there are central
tenants of the novel that should not be changed. Leave a scene out, add a joke
in, but when you make changes at the fundamental level, do the right thing and
just write an original movie. You can pay homage to a story in a unique
creation, similar to what House did
for Sherlock Holmes, or
Arrested Development did for The Godfather. As I said, I think Sherlock Holmes was fun but it was a Guy
Ritchie steampunk film, not Sherlock Holmes. Forcing an old franchise onto a
new image undermines both parts. I would much prefer see a new movie on its own
merits rather than see my favorite classics get the Michael Bayed. In the
meantime, if you must take a short cut stick to Cliffnotes. Because I do not
care what the poster outside the Multiplex is advertising, chances are good
that it is all a big lie.
