From Page to Screen

Ben Kingsley and Penélope Cruz in Elegy

Controversial French novelist Michel Houellebecq has made his directorial debut with The Possibility of an Island (La Possibilité d’une île), an adaptation of his 2005 novel of the same name. Houellebecq’s novel was poorly received and now his film is being eviscerated by French critics.

Friday saw the UK-US release of Elegy, Spanish director Isabel Coixet’s adaptation of Philip Roth’s 2001 novella, The Dying Animal, to mixed reviews. ‘Despite some low-key lovemaking and the considerably more overwrought talk, there’s very little pleasure to be found amid this film’s penumbral lighting, careful compositions and muffled, muffling good taste,’ wrote Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. ‘Dilution, bowdlerization, counter-readings and heresy are legitimate strategies in the adaptation racket. Dullness isn’t,’ Dargis noted, adding that Elegy is ‘an overly polite take on a spiky, claustrophobic, insistently impolite novel, but this wouldn’t be such an issue if Coixet had the cinematic language that could withstand, equal, obliterate or transcend the book’s blunt force, its beautiful sentences, flashes of genius and spleen’.

Roth’s novels haven’t had much luck on screen. The best thing one can say about 2003’s The Human Stain, a leaden, humourless and implausible adaptation of Roth’s 2000 novel, is that it retained the book’s title. Australian director Philip Noyce’s adaptation of Roth’s ambitious 1997 novel American Pastoral was meant for release in 2004; at the time of writing, the Internet Movie database reports the film as ‘development status unknown’, which doesn’t sound promising. Whether Noyce’s commercial success with Patriot Games (1992) and Clear and Present Danger (1994) – respectable Harrison Ford action thrillers based on Tom Clancy novels – gives him an advantage when it comes to adapting books to screen is open to debate.

Goodbye, Columbus, Larry Peerce’s 1969 adaptation of Roth’s early novella (which lent its title to his debut collection) is arguably the most successful Roth transition to film; it’s certainly the most exuberantly enjoyable. This may be because Goodbye, Columbus tells a straightforward story, in a linear, uncomplicated narrative, and is free of multiple monologuists or unbearable anguish. On the other hand, famed screenwriter Ernest Lehman never directed another film after his disastrous debut, Portnoy’s Complaint, the 1971 adaptation of the novel that made Roth’s career.

Several literary adaptations released on film this year have been poorly received; these include Blindness, the Fernando Meirelles (whose 2005 adaptation of John Le Carre’s The Constant Gardener was enormously impressive) adaptation of Nobel Literature laureate Jose Saramago’s 1995 novel, David Gordon Green’s film of Stewart O’Nan’s 1994 Snow Angels, Tannishtha Chatterjee’s take on Monica Ali’s bestseller Brick Lane, Mike Newell’s attempt at Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera and Jeremy Podeswa’s adaptation of Anne Michael’s acclaimed 1996 debut, Fugitive Pieces.

The most widely praised recent adaptation of a contemporary novel is almost certainly last year’s No Country for Old Men, Joel and Ethan Coen’s Oscar-winning film of the Cormac McCarthy bestseller. McCarthy’s vivid, lyrical, charged prose may have a cinematic quality, but Billy Bob Thornton’s 2000 adaptation of All the Pretty Horses was largely unsuccessful.

If you are hoping to see an exceptional adaptation of a contemporary novel, still awaiting release this year (and in time for awards season) are director Gina Prince-Bythewood’s spin on Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, Sam Mendes’s attempt to navigate Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road (Mendes was one of the producer’s of 2007’s little-seen adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner) and The Road, Australian director John Hillcoat’s film of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic American allegory.