Don’t Wait for the Movie

For the past six weeks, I’ve been teaching a film and literature class for Education Encore at Gulf Coast Community College. Each week we examine different books, the films they’ve inspired, and the adaptation process. It’s a fun class. This term we’ve covered, among others, “The Reader,” “Revolutionary Road,” “In the Cut,” “No Country for Old Men,” “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist,” “The End of the Affair,” “Adaptation,” and “Doubt.”

Each term, my students and I learn something new about film and literature, about character and dialog and pacing and language and interiority, but more than anything else, year after year, term after term, class after class, we learn just how superior literature is to film.

Don’t get me wrong. I love film. But the very best films never come close to achieving what their literary counterparts do—and that’s the best films. What about the average or below average movies, the ones that attempt to reach the broadest audience of moviegoers? Do they provide anything more than diversion, than a couple of hours of escape?

There’s nothing wrong with a little diversion, with an occasional escape—even an essentially mindless one—but like junk food in our diets, more than a little of it quickly becomes harmful (though, deceptively, its true damage isn’t readily manifest in the short-term).

Again, I’m not arguing against film. Film has it’s place. It’s just become too big a place in our culture. I’m not saying don’t watch movies. I am saying read more books—and if this leads to less time to watch movies, that’s not a bad thing. Not a bad thing at all.

Why don’t we read more? Perhaps because of what it requires of us. It takes time to read. A movie cost us two hours, a book eight to ten times that—or more. Movies do all the work for us. We sit passively and take it in. Books require us to work. Reading is active. We’re not just using our eyes and minds, but our imaginations.

Books require more of us, but they give far more to us.

Reading isn’t just better for us, it’s better to us.

A good book isn’t just entertaining or informational, it’s transformational. Literature speaks to the deepest parts of who we are, enables us to connect with others in profound ways, learning about them as well as ourselves.

One of the greatest things movies do is draw out attention to books. Because movies have such large budgets and audiences, they often alert us to great books we may have missed. In fact, just recently I read both “Revolutionary Road” and “The Reader” because of the massive media campaigns their movies generated. Interestingly, “The Reader” was already on my shelf next to another Schlink book I’d read, “Flights of Love.” I’d picked up “The Reader” somewhere along the way during my countless hours of browsing in bookstores and just hadn’t gotten to it yet.

The idea of this column came about because certain of my students had seen “No Country for Old Men” and hated it, but found themselves really drawn in as we began to read the book together. I’d say odds are good this would happen a lot. Try it sometime. If you don’t like a particular movie, chances are still good you’ll like the book it was based on. If you like a movie, chances are good you’ll love the book that inspired it.

A longtime fan of Annie Proulx, I had somehow missed her short story, “Brokeback Mountain.” In anticipation of seeing the film when it came out, I pulled her collection, “Close Range” from the shelf so I could read the short story before I saw the movie. I read the story, but to this day, I still haven’t seen the movie. Why? Because I was so moved by the story of Ennis and Jack, so heartbroken by their fates, so in awe of Ms. Proulx’s stunning use of language, so completely satisfied with the entire experience, I knew that watching the adaptation couldn’t add anything to it, and therefore, would likely take something away.

I guess what I’m trying to say is don’t wait for the movie. Read the book.

This is the Zodiac speaking

My friend Michael Connelly, one of the world’s greatest practitioners of police procedurals, often says the best cases aren’t the ones cops work on, but the ones that work on cops.

It’s a profound statement—one that Connelly attributes to Joseph Heller(if memory serves)—and as I watched David Fincher’s “Zodiac,” just released on Blu-ray, I kept thinking about it. Few cases worked on those who worked on it like the Zodiac killer case—and not just cops, but reporters, forensics experts, and even a cartoonist.

It’s the stuff of enduring crime fiction—the unsolved case that clings to a cop like little bits of karma, haunting his or her work-obsessed days and sleepless, gin-soaked nights.

With respect to Brad and Benjamin, David Fincher’s masterwork is not the curious case of the backwards growing man-boy, but the disquieting case of the letter-writing serial killer who called himself the Zodiac.

More police procedural than a slick serial-killer flick, “Zodiac” is a slow-burn of a crime film that creeps into your consciousness and just sits there, waiting, breathing, readying to strike. It follows the investigation of the Zodiac killings that terrorized the San Francisco Bay area in the late 60s and early 70s. The Zodiac not only killed people, but created a Jack the Ripper aura by sending letters to the newspapers and daring readers to solve coded messages. But the film’s focus isn’t on the Zodiac so much as those who are working on and being worked on by his case.

All the performances in “Zodiac” are outstanding. Even so, some still standout among them—the amazing Robert Downey Jr., the awkward hero/cartoonist, Jake Gyllenhaal, and the hard-working cop, Mark Ruffalo.

Fincher and his genius cinematographer Harris Savides capture the period and feel of the city with restraint and precision, and James Vanderbilt’s screenplay is a throwback to character-driven storytelling far too rare these days.

The 70s are considered by many to be American Cinema’s best decade ever so it’s the highest compliment I can give this film and its director to say that it really fits well in the period in which it’s set. Put “Zodiac” right alongside “Chinatown,” “The Godfather,” “The Exorcist,” and “The French Connection.” It holds up. Put the name Fincher right alongside auteurs, Coppola, Polanski, and Scorsese. He holds his own.

More than anything else, I think “Zodiac” is about obsession. The cops and newspaper mens’ obsession with the Zodiac no less than David Fincher’s obsession with filmmaking or Robert Downey’s obsession with acting. This is something I understand, and it reminds me of a quote by John Gardner I often think of when I’m suffering from the tunnel vision working on a novel brings. “True artists, whatever smiling face they may show you, are obsessive, driven people.” People who are good at what they do are obsessed with it—this is no less true of teachers and homemakers than serial killers and cops.

“Zodiac” reminds me of a complex song. Unlike its pop counterparts, it’s not as catchy or obviously infectious at first, but long after bubble gum pop has lost its flavor, a great song that had to grow on you endures. I’ve seen “Zodiac” some 5 or 6 times now, and it only gets better with subsequent viewings, which makes it truly remarkable—a perfect 70s era character-driven police procedural.

Last Chance Romance

When we’re young, possibilities seem endless, chances infinite. As we get older, as we journey further and further down the paths chosen, as we get further and further away from the paths not chosen, we realize how every choice is actually many choices—and how way leads on to way and we’ll never be back to these particular two road diverging in a yellow wood ever again. Every path we choose is also a choice against other paths, making our choices far more limited than we can even imagine, and as we continue on we see, tragically, how fewer and fewer choices we have left.

Most romance movies are, unfortunately, about young, pretty people, untouched by disappointment, unlined by time, who will live forever and who have an eternity of chances to squander, but occasionally a film comes along for grownups—one in which the potential lovers are a bit bent over and world-weary, aware, perhaps acutely, that soon one of the chances encountered will be their last. This truth, this humbling awareness inspires sobriety and clarity, thoughtfulness and carefulness. These lovers aren’t reckless with their chances for they know their chances aren’t infinite. Perhaps this knowledge leads to a slight desperation, but more than anything it imbues them with a hesitancy I find irresistibly charming and gives them a gratitude for chances their younger selves took for granted.

Life has a way of lowering expectations (if our childhoods are good enough to make them high to begin with) and shattering illusions. What remains is far more real, far more interesting. It’s part of why, even as time goes by, Rick and Ilsa are quintessential, timeless lovers.

Though no Rick and Ilsa, Harvey Shine and Kate Walker are characters cut from the same well-worn cloth—elevated by the performances of well-worn actors Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson.

Set in London, “Last Chance Harvey” is a romantic dramedy starring Dustin Hoffman as Harvey Shine, a divorced and haggard jingle-writer quickly aging out of his career and workaholic ways. With a warning from his boss (Richard Schiff) not to bother rushing back, Harvey goes to London, begrudgingly, for his daughter's wedding, desperately fielding work calls the whole time he’s there.

When Harvey greets his estranged daughter, Susie (Liane Balaban), it becomes clear just how far away he’s grown from his family. The film never spells out in exactly what ways Harvey was a bad father, but that Susie asks her stepfather (James Brolin) to give her away says it all. As Harvey leaves his heartbreak at the ceremony for an emergency work call, he misses his flight and gets fired.

Nursing a whiskey at the airport bar, Harvey bumps into Kate (Emma Thompson), an airport employee escaping her own bad day with a glass of wine and a book. Suddenly taken by Kate's British charm, a tipsy Harvey bombards her with tales of his trouble. This unlikely trading of sob stories leads to lunch, a walk around London, and a day of unexpected romance.

Thompson and Hoffman bring far more to these characters than younger actors could (remind me again why our culture in general and Hollywood in particular is so obsessed with teens?) giving Kate and Harvey wit and charm just above their disappointments and essential sadness.

“Last Chance Harvey” is slow-paced (like its protagonists) and obvious in ways that border on cliché (and perhaps even crosses those borders sometimes), but it’s also adultly romantic and sweet and sad.

Over a decade ago, while in my twenties, a woman told me I had the priorities of a much older man. It was one of the best compliments I received at the time, the only one I even remember, and sitting alone in the theater watching Harvey on the enormous screen, I thought the greatest thing I could take from his experience is not to wait until late in life to figure out what really matters. For even as a still sort of youngish man it’s possible that some seemingly random chance to be and act loving just might be my last.

You Say You Want a Revolution

Thoreau said most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. He must have foreseen the proliferation of the suburbs.

Richard Yate’s masterful, insightful “Revolutionary Road” is about a couple—Frank and April Wheeler—who desperately want to break out of their quietly desperate lives, to escape the cage of suburbia and fly away to Paris. This leads to a question inspired by the most honest character in the book, a mental patient who asks, Are these the Wheelers on Revolutionary Road or the Revolutionaries on Wheeler Road?

Frank Wheeler says he wants a revolution. April Wheeler says she has a real solution.

In the unreal America of the 1950s, Frank and April Wheeler appear to be an ideal couple: smart, sexy, talented, with two young children and a starter home in the suburbs. Maybe they married too young, started a family too early, bought the starter home too quickly, bought the American dream too naively. Maybe Frank’s job is meaningless. And April never saw herself as a housewife. Yet they have always lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner. But now that certainty is about to crumble.

Frank is mired in his well-paying but boring office job and April is still mourning the demise of her hoped-for acting career. Determined to identify themselves as superior to the mediocre sprawl of suburbanites who surround them, they decide to move to Paris where “people really live” and where the Wheelers can develop their true artistic sensibilities, free of the demands of consumerism required by capitalist America.

The question asked of us by “Revolutionary Road” is: What do you do when you get what you want and you find out you don’t want it after all? Or perhaps, What happens when you have all your needs and most of your wants met? I’ll tell you. In the comfort and safety and quietness of the “good life” you have time to think, you have the solitude and silence to hear the question rising out of the deep well of your cavernous soul, asking “Is this all there is?”

Then the indescribable, undefinable dull ache inside begins—or begins to be felt.

The Wheelers discover what so many do in life—it doesn’t matter how full your house or bank account is if you’re empty inside.

Derived from Old French and Latin words, suburb literally means “under the city.” Perhaps the first ones were, and though now suburbs are more “away” from than “under” the city, it’s what’s going on “under” the surface, the fissures beneath the facade, the decay behind the idyllic illusion of the “little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky, little boxes, little boxes all the same.”

For a little while is appears that Frank and April are going to be the Revolutionaries on Wheeler Road, but fear and comfort and dishonesty and denial cause them to conform right back to merely being the Wheelers on Revolutionary Road.
You say you want a revolution.

Me, too. Let’s do it.

You tell me that it’s evolution, that you have a real solution.

Me, too. I’m with you.

It’s not by freeing ourselves from suburbia, but by freeing our minds from the prison of conformity to family, religious, and cultural conventions and assumptions. True revolutionary freedom doesn’t come from changing our addresses, but from changing our minds, our hearts, finding real meaning and purpose—not from flying away to Paris, but from letting our spirits soar. If, like the Wheelers, if like Thoreau, we don’t want to go to the grave with the song still in us, then baby don’t wait, just start singing.