[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by Sauron the White

Recently, I started another thread, Lawrence of Middle-earth. In it I quoted from Wikipedia on all of the changes that were made when doing the much loved film LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. I believe it helps put the lie to the complaint heard here far too often that "the LOTR movies were not faithful to the books and thus were not very good". For some reason, few people cared to post.

My point is that a good film is not dependent on a faithful adaption from its source. It mattters not and is no real consequence.

I picked LAWRENCE because it is generally heralded as one of the great films of all time. Now, here is yet another. In 1939, MGM gave us THE WIZARD OF OZ. It is based on the book by L. Frank Baum. The film is both highly thought of by the experts (see AFI Top 100 Films of All Time) and the public who have loved it for decades now. However, it was not anything approaching a faithful adaption from its source material.

. . .

Combine this with the lesson of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. A great film does not have to be slavishly faithful to its source material to work on screen and be embraced and loved by the public. Faithfulness means little compared to all of the other things that truly determine the success of a film.

I for one don't recall seeing the Lawrence of Middle earth thread, so it must have been posted on one of the many days that I was too busy in RL to check out the Downs and I'm such a slouch that I don't actively search all the new stuff when I return. Aren't you all lucky that I didn't take up that gauntlet.

But in honour of this new testament to your stalwart efforts to defend the films (and I mean that as a positive acknowledgement of your persistence), StW, let me take some time off on this holiday and holy day to provide some thoughts about your dismissal of faithfulness as the significant attribute about movie adaptations of books.

I do so by offerring another example of an adaptation, an example which I hope Rune will forgive: The English Patient. I do so because Ondaatje does what Tolkien does (despite the obvious differences between writers); both give us exquisite visual images and complex themes within chronological leaps.

Many, many people thought Michael Ondaatje's novel of the same name could never be filmed. Yet Anthony Minghella accomplished the near-impossible. He did so with many changes, omissions, distortions, but he did so in order to create a cinematic experience that was faithful to the readerly experience.

And rather than follow my own rambling ideas how this is possible, I'm going to quote from a variety of sources which explore, each in its own way, this tantalizing oxymoron of faithful difference.

First, here's a snippet of what the Director said about his purpose:

Originally Posted by Minghella

In a 1996 interview with The Associated Press, Minghella said the film was the pinnacle of his career at the time: “I feel more naked and more exposed by this piece of work than anything I've ever been involved with.”

He said too many modern films let the audience be passive, as if they were saying, “We're going to rock you and thrill you. We'll do everything for you.”

“This film goes absolutely against that grain,” he said. “It says, ‘I'm sorry, but you're going to have to make some connections. There are some puzzles here. The story will constantly rethread itself and it will be elliptical, but there are enormous rewards in that.”'

Interesting there that Minghella rejects the blockbuster action flick mode in favour of demanding more complex cinematic experience.

Then this bit from Spliced: The Patience of making "The English Patient"

Ondaatje's book has almost a religious following and adapting it to film was an exacting process, Minghella said. Staying true to the book was important, yet the medium of film demands such a vastly different approach.

"It's a book that is so complicated, so fragmented, so persistently narrative and so beautiful that I think a lot of people thought I was bombing to even try to do it. But I just had such a dream of what the film could be like."

His dream has been met with a very positive response from critics and from the author, who was so taken with the film that he accompanied Minghella, Zaentz and some of the actors to the press junket in San Francisco.

Staying true to the book was something always in Minghella's mind, if not to the outright details, to the core experience of the novel.

Ondaatje has some very interesting things to say about the adaptation in this Salon interview: Ondaatje on image and plot.

And, finally, let me quote from an Obituary notice on Minghella. This is from The Globe and Mail, Wednesday, March 19, 2008. I'm not sure this is in any online version.

Originally Posted by Ben Child, "His Oscar for The English Patient brought unaccustomed acclaim"

The project began to take shape even as Mr. Minghella picked up the book for the first time. He read it in one sitting. 'When I put the book down,' he later wrote, 'it was dark, and I had no idea where I was.'

It was the beginning [of] a long and twisting journey. 'I began working on this film because I'd loved a novel I'd read,' he said. [b]'My ambitions didn't go much beyond that. I just wanted to live inside a world I'd inhabited as a reader[/b.]' [my bolding]

. . .

The script, however, was a conscious departure from the novel. Given the book's non-linear plot, Mr. Minghella realized he could never write a traditional three-act film. Instead, he took the novel's basic conceit of four strangers converging on a Tuscan villa in the waning days of the Second World War, and emphasized the story's two main love stories. In the process, Mr. Ondaatje's story was given greater structure and a firmer chronology. While Mr. Minghella was responsible for plucking out the cinematic heart of an impressionistic, non-linear novel, he said Mr. Ondaatje was an indispensable navigator.

. . .

The result, wrote Rock Groen in The Globe, was an almost perfect model for adapting a high-brow book to the commercial screen. 'In whisking Michael Ondaatje's stylish prose off the page and putting it in front of the camera, the picture does for its literary source what few adaptations have--not only straightening the narrative twists into a more accessible line, but actually clarifying the most significant of the novel's recurring images and complex themes.'

There I think we have operational explanations of what faithfulness means. Jackson didn't make Tolkien more meaningful and understandable, he made him more like George Lucas. That's probably faithful to Jackson's own imagination, but it ain't faithful to that core experience Minghella described, of "wanting to live inside a world I'd inhabited as a reader."