Books v. Movies

Book versus movie. Literary-snob types will tell you that book always wins because movie can never capture the depth of a good book. Movie-loving realists will point out that not all books are worth the week or more you put into them, and besides, in the hands of a capable director, their stories can sometimes be elevated beyond the confines of the dust jacket.

As a lover of both, I take a somewhat different approach. My personal policy is to see the movie before I read the book.

Heresy, says the literary snob in me. I know. But it is because of the literary snob that I have this policy in place. Why?

This seems like the most obvious statement of the year, but movies and books, though they share a reliance on good stories and vivid imagery, are vastly different mediums. When I watch a movie, I want to appreciate it as a movie. If I’m watching a movie adaptation of a book that I’ve read (especially one I’ve loved), I will constantly be making mental comparisons between what’s on the screen and what I remember from the page. I therefore won’t be enjoying the movie as a movie, but will experience it as a shadow-of-the-book. 

By the very nature of their narrative limitations, movies have to be far more economical in their final cut, whereas novels (or books in general)  can be experienced over a much longer time and at the reader’s leisure, and can meander and pause at various points in the story, ruminating on whatever points the author chooses.

The clearest example of this difference, for me, is Trainspotting. When the Trainspotting  movie came out, I had never heard of Irvine Welsh, let along the novel of the same name. The movie blew me away. After seeing it a number of times in the theater, I borrowed a copy of the novel and devoured it as quickly as a stoned hippy devours an extra-large, double cheese pizza (that’s fast, brother). Sometime after reading the novel, I tried to watch the movie again, but I couldn’t get through it. I could see all the things they’d cut from the script, could see how characters had been combined, how multiple scenes had been distilled into one scene, how much more shallow the movie felt when compared to the book.

But was that fair to the movie? No. Trainspotting the movie remains one of the most visually innovative I’ve ever seen. Watching it for the first time, I felt as though I was experiencing something completely new, as images, music, and dialogue combined in ways that movies had not previously done for me. The scene where Ewan MacGregor crawls through a filthy, shit-filled toilet to retrieve a narcotic suppository, and the one where he overdoses and sinks into the floor as Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” begins are two of the most unforgettable from modern cinema, two that perfectly capture the desperation of the heroin addict. A novel can never give you that, no matter how well written. Seeing the movie before reading the book allowed me to be wowed in the way the director had intended.

In short, though drawn from the same source material, Trainspotting the movie and Trainspotting the novel were two distinct creations, each deserving of their own autonomy.

As you can likely tell by this point, there is an inherent bias built into my rule. That is, the book is always better than the movie. But alas, every rule is meant to be broken.

No movie has ever outshone its source material more than did the Coen Brothers’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men.

As much as it saddens me to admit it, Cormac McCarthy has really phoned it in with his recent novels. Cities of the Plain, No Country for Old Men, and The Road have all read like the readymade for Hollywood novels that they are. Cities of the Plain, which was the third and final installment of The Border Trilogy (All the Pretty Horses & The Crossing are the first two), was the first written, and McCarthy has, in interviews, said that he originally conceived it as a screenplay. Indeed, when you read it, it stands in stark contrast to the two preceding volumes. All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing are written in the lyrical, Faulknerian style for which McCarthy is most famous. In contrast, Cities of the Plain is written in short, declarative sentences (or phrases), and the characters, which are introduced in the first two novels, are flat stereotypes of their former selves, mere gestures of the full-bodied characters that they were when we first met them.

Which is exactly the problem with the novel, No Country for Old Men. Anton Chigurh, the face of total evil in both novel and movie, is but a barely articulated version of Judge Holden from Blood Meridian. Llewelyn Moss is but a slightly older and only somewhat less naive version of the Kid. And tying the whole narrative together are the ruminations of the old and out-of-his-depth sherriff Ed Tom Bell. To a reader well versed in McCarthy’s Western novels, it can seem at times as if Ed Tom is synonymous with McCarthy the author, who is retelling and rethinking, in a much reduced and revised version, what is arguably his greatest novel.

But in the hands of the Coen Brothers, what feels flat and contrived on the page comes to life. The lyricism that was so absent in the novel is recreated and brought to life in the panoramic shots of the desert West. Javier Bardem’s portrayal of Anton Chigurh breathes nuance and life into an otherwise two-dimensional character, while Josh Brolin adds layers of realism and depth to the studied, naive, Hemingway-esque machismo of Llewelyn. Not one time during my reading of the novel did I ever feel the suspense and tension that the Coen Brothers so masterfully create in the movie. Never in my reading of the novel did I fully appreciate the vulnerability and outright befuddlement that Tommy Lee Jones brings out in his portrayal of Sherriff Bell.

Perhaps it is fitting that the next novel-to-movie that I’m most looking forward to is also based on a Cormac McCarthy book—the fabled Blood Meridian. Optioned, adapted for the screen, and directed by Todd Field, this interpretation will be of supreme interest to fans and non-fans alike. The question foremost on my mind is just how Fields will present the unflinching gore and violence that is the core of this masterpiece. In this case, I will be heading into the movie theater willfully comparing screen to page.