Adaptarama!

BY Claire Wiltshire; Esther Van Doornum; Stuart Geddes

Ghost World By Claire Wiltshire

Most of us can relate to Ghost World’s sourpuss heroine Enid Coleslaw, with her thick-rimmed glasses and an adolescent disdain for mundane, suburban life. In his successful graphic novel, Daniel Clowes created his female incarnation (also an anagram of his own name). Ghost World was skilfully transformed into a 2001 film directed by Terry Zwigoff, famed for Crumb (1994), his sensitive yet revealing biopic of notorious illustrator Robert Crumb.

With Clowes as co-writer, Ghost World the film faithfully recreates the look of the book, even adding to its comic feel with gaudy colour, spider-web power-line skies and overt pop-cultural iconography. Each frame evokes the graphic novel style and is as carefully constructed, replete with the caricature embodiments of Enid (Thora Birch), Rebecca (an inexperienced and typically wooden Scarlett Johansson) and Seymour (Steve Buscemi). The cynical witticisms of the teenage best friends are paramount in both book and film, but to allow a stronger cinematic narrative flow, other Clowes characters are compressed into one: the tragic, middle-aged loner Seymour. Focus is on the unlikely relationship between Seymour and Enid and the ultimate redemption of Enid’s character, as the consequences of a practical joke turn disastrously sour.

The Human Stain By Esther Van Doornum

Philip Roth’s The Human Stain is about sex, politics, racism and unhappy people with secrets. Coleman Silk, a classics professor, is forced to resign after making a supposed racial slur about two African-American students he has never met. What people don’t know and what he doesn’t tell them is that he too is African-American – a pale-skinned African-American.

Coleman has only to reveal his true identity for the whole palaver to be over and done with – but he doesn’t. He is made a pariah, his wife dies and his life turns to shit. Coleman’s personal dilemma, his struggle with his own identity, is at the heart of this colossal book. Roth is interested in the public versus the private self – the self we show the world versus who we really are.

While Roth’s novel is a double espresso, Robert Benton’s film adaptation is a chamomile tea. Apart from being badly cast – Anthony Hopkins as an African American? – the film leaves out characters that are essential to the plot, and skims over many of the book’s ideas and details. There is a lot going on but very little happens and we are left with only a shell of a story.

My advice – ditch the film and read the book.

Sin City By Stuart Geddes

In the letters page of the Sin City comics, Frank Miller repeatedly, categorically stated there would never be a Sin City film. Why, then, did he bludgeon his own work in such a dramatic, sensational fashion? Miller is a visionary comic writer, artist and (at times) activist, but he, more than most, should know that comics and film are vastly different mediums, and a direct translation from one to the other is not only inappropriate, it’s also boring.

In the comics, Miller’s film noir-influenced visual language was unique, rich and startling. But its direct translation back to film stole its hybrid beauty and made it cheap, gimmicky and overstated. Likewise, the film’s disturbing violence was exactly the same as in the books. But in Miller’s ink-on-paper world, violence was part of the background. On celluloid, the blood spurted, the bones cracked, the timing emphasised the spectacle.

My final gripe is with characterisation. Over ten years of comics, Miller transformed (intentionally) cardboard stereotypes into fully formed characters. Their stilted, corny dialogue was believable. Over the film’s two hours, the characters (despite the potentially glorious casting and talented actors) remain wooden and uninspired pilgrims on their savage journey. The female characters, especially, suffered from this contraction of time and context.

Seeing Sin City made me question Frank Miller’s re-reading of his own work. Oddly enough, I think my reading was better.

Lord of the Rings By Claire Wiltshire

An easily digestible, 90-minute, visually spectacular film often validates the work of literary giants from George Orwell to Harper Lee. When ABC recently conducted a poll to determine Australia’s all-time favourite book, the televised presentation of the top ten showed “footage from the film” for most of the chosen books. Sitting proudly at number one was Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings, the cinematic incarnation of which was enjoying a three-year reign of box-office and Oscar success. Why must it take a film production of an epic book to remind everyone of the greatness of its inspiration?

Director Peter Jackson’s vision was magnificently rendered in his three-part epic production. The trilogy painstakingly brought to life the enormity of the Helm’s Deep battleground, the fear and trepidation created by the mysterious Dark Riders in the Old Forest. Yet the films fail to convey the smallness of hobbits or translate the intricate beauty of the written Elven language.

As a lover of Tolkien’s magical, long-winded, self-indulgent prose, I found the film’s attempt to bring these worlds alive pointless – droll even, like recounting a dream to a wearying friend. The written word need not always be bastardised by Hollywood. Imagination comes alive in your own reading experience.