The AV Club’s fun little inventory of literary works that should never be adapted to film again got us to thinking about that age old question — book vs. film. Common wisdom holds that “the book is always better than the film,” with any number of examples as evidence. Some of the works cited on the AV Club’s list are novels that can’t really be translated to film, at least not in philosophical essence (Moby-Dick, for example, and Nabokov’s Lolita, a film that for reasons social and legal, can never be made properly).
Our own observation, or rule of thumb, is that, while canonical “high” literature rarely makes for masterpiece filmmaking, genre fare–done right–can make classic films. In Francis Ford Coppola’s hands, Mario Puzo’s airport bookstore pickup The Godfather became two of the greatest films of all time. Look at what Stephen Spielberg did for Peter Benchley’s beach read Jaws, or what Kubrick did for Stephen King’s pulp horror The Shining. In more recent times, Alfonso Cuarón turned P.D. James’s capable thriller Children of Men into cinematic gold, but, tellingly, stumbled in adapting the Charles Dickens classic Great Expectations. Terrence Malick turned James Jones’s war novel The Thin Red Line into cinematic art and Martin Scorsese spun Goodfellas from Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy–hardly Shakespeare. Danny Boyle has made a career of turning lesser works by writers like Alex Garland and Irvine Welsh into fantastic films.
Very few films present a tough choice, really–we’re still not sure if the Coens’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men is better than the book, but it might be. Gary Sinise’s measured take on John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men gets just about everything right. Heck, Harold Bloom has even argued quite publicly that John Huston’s version of The Grapes of Wrath is superior to Steinbeck’s. We’re not sure about that one either. Suffice to say that they’re different; that watching a film is not the same as reading a book, nor should it be. We close by saying that we’d love to see Chris Adrian’s The Children’s Hospital adapted to film, preferably by someone awesome like David Lynch or Cuarón, and that, as Sam Peckinpah is long dead, no one should try to adapt Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.
Biblioklept 