Saturday Night at the Movies: Carrots

Happy Mother's Day!

Last week, I promised to share my favorite movie adaptation of a book. If there’s one thing y’all should have learned from my writing these past few months, it’s to never trust a doctor. Sorry! I don’t have a movie for you, not exactly. It’s a miniseries.

Here’s the deal. Faithful adaptations of literary masterpieces are not easy. Take Pride and Prejudice. You may have it in your library. If so, go and look: not a particularly hefty volume. Yet the superb BBC adaptation, the one with Colin Firth, is almost six hours long. How then can you take a Dickens novel – typically twice or more the length of an Austen work – and preserve its character in a ninety minute production? Many have tried – with Dickens, Austen, and other classics – and while they haven’t always failed, I don’t know if I’d nominate any as resounding successes. The challenge is, perhaps, an insurmountable one. (I know we have some brilliant movie critics at this substack, please feel free to prove me wrong!)

The best movie adaptations tend to be of inferior books, which leave room for a gifted director to add a great deal. The Godfather – the favorite book of precisely nobody who isn’t a horny teenage boy – being the perfect example. I have fond memories of the Before Times, when theaters still mattered and almost every year brought a thrilling cinematic adaptation of a John Grisham novel I would go see with my dad, but even so I could care less about the paperback copies of The Firm or The Pelican Brief.

So, assuming Steven King is not my favorite author – a very fair assumption – we have to stick with the miniseries option.

Putting length aside, there’s the problem of adequately translating reading into viewing. A famous chapter in Howards End contains a pitch-perfect description of what it is like to experience a Beethoven symphony. Forster does all he can to capture the emotional rapture of the Fifth via the written word – yet even his literary genius is no match for the real thing. How then to translate Forster’s translation to the big screen? In the excellent, star-studded Merchant-Ivory production, no serious attempt is made; it would be too difficult, or come off as too ‘experimental.’ Other scenes in that and similar movies will have narrator voice-overs or off-screen characters reading letters like a Ken Burns documentary in an attempt to get the book’s language more fully onto celluloid, but it’s never quite the same, is it? Shakespeare is made to be performed,plot-driven action-packed legal/spy/horror thrillers can be performed without losing much if anything, but great novels written as great novels – each page packed with personality and passion – do not bear much filming. Saul Bellow is perhaps the most celebrated writer of the last century, two of his books changed my life, yet I don’t think a single one of his works ever made a splash on the big screen. He’s just not that filmable.   

So, we need a miniseries, and we need a novel written beautifully enough to be loved, but that isn’t too literary. The choice, my friends, is clear. And she’s a redhead.

Anne of Green Gables would have made a terrific play. So much of the work’s charm depends on Anne, and Anne is constitutionally incapable of interior monologue – she just blurts it all out. Matthew hardly says a word, which is just as easily captured on screen as on the page. And when you take the non-stop speech of Anne, the silence of Matthew, and film them on location in front of the timeless natural beauty of Prince Edward Island, the result is, hands-down, my favorite film adaptation of all time.

No CGI needed

Don’t get me wrong. It’s still not perfect, LM Montgomery is too good a writer for that. Take her opening paragraph:

Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies’ eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde’s Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde’s door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs. Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof.

That is simply perfect, and simply unfilmable. Please do read the book if you haven’t. Yet, unlike the disaster that was Gerwig’s Little Women, do rest assured that you can enjoy the film (er, miniseries) as well. The acting is fantastic, the adaptation faithful in every detail (don’t miss the recitation of The Highwayman!), and the scenery sublime. I hope you will enjoy it.

I can easily turn this post into another rant about Big Pharma and ADHD. In fact, I already have. Yet now is not the time. Tomorrow is Mother’s Day. My wife has been rolling her eyes at Mother’s Day ads she’s been seeing lately, ones that celebrate ‘dog moms’ and ‘cat moms’ alongside actual moms. True, if the American Academy of Pediatrics and friends have their baby-killing way, gerbil moms will soon be the only ones left to celebrate the day, but in the meantime I wanted to take the occasion to honor a different kind of non-biological mom. There may be no more beautiful mother-daughter bond in literature than that between Anne and her (initially rather reluctant) adoptive mom, Marilla. So to all the Marillas out there, God bless you, thank you for what you do, and all my best wishes for a Happy Mother’s Day.