The Oscars 2006
Kiera Knightley or Rachel Weisz? Jane Austen or John Le Carre? This year’s crop of Oscar nominated films owes a lot to adaptations from successful books. Last Sunday night the Oscar Ceremony threshed the wheat from the chaff, the winners from the wannabes. The famous red carpet has been rolled up for another year and the winners have departed gleefully clutching their Oscar statuettes, the wannabes licking their wounded egos.
And the winners are … Annie Proulx for Brokeback Mountain, John Le Carre for The Constant Gardner, Truman Capote for In Cold Blood, and Arthur Golden for Memoirs of a Geisha.
The screenplay for ‘Brokeback Mountain’ is adapted from a short story of the same title by Annie Proulx. Proulx’s previous bestselling and prizewinning novel, The Shipping News had already been successfully transposed to the silver screen. Brokeback Mountain is a short story – just 30 pages long – in a collection of tales sharing the theme of life, and death, on the open range.
The same ruggedly beautiful writing is ever present; Proulx transports the reader to the wide open spaces of Wyoming and plays the drama out against a backdrop of mountain ranges and rivers, with a cast of horses, lonesome cowboys and coyotes.
Le Carre is also no newcomer to film adaptations; just as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was infused with the spirit of the cold war so The Constant Gardener is also driven by zeitgeist. Le Carre uses the thriller format to paint a passionate condemnation of Western interference and indifference in contemporary Africa. With echoes of Graham Greene, Le Carre cleverly twists a plot between the two extremes of personal and global politics; drawing the reader into the personal, emotional drama and simultaneously exposing the rank hypocrisy endemic in the developed nations’ underdevelopment of Africa.
How closely should a film duplicate its written source material? Adapting non-fiction books for the big screen is inherently more problematic than adapting fiction – doubly so when the writer chooses to tell a true story as a novel. Truman Capote investigated the slaughter of the Clutter family as a reporter for the New Yorker Magazine yet you will find In Cold Blood on the fiction shelves in bookshops and not with the true crime. Whatever its provenance the book is rightly considered one of the great classics of 20th Century American literature. Gripping and chilling, In Cold Blood holds a mirror up to American society and values – and by extension our own – to reveal an appetite for casual, callous violence, and an unhealthy obsession with fame and celebrity.
‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ is a book of fiction which pretends to be autobiography, allegedly written by Sayuri, Japan’s one-time principal geisha. Arthur Golden, a Harvard graduate in Japanese studies, has created a stunning and credible work; beautifully written, opening up a formerly closed world with accuracy and empathy. In his acknowledgments Golden pays homage to Japan’s real life premiere Geisha, Mineko Iwasaki who was in many ways the model for his heroine Sayuri. Mineko has subsequently written her own memoirs, ‘The Geisha of Gion’, providing us with more insight into the Geisha world and also another angle on the creative process linking life story, biography, fiction and film.
These reviews were first published by the 'Times & Star' 10th March 2006. The copyright remains the property of The Derwent Bookshop.
No comments:
Post a Comment