John Butleron the book-ruining power of film adaptations.
You don't even have to visit a movie-oriented website to find out what's shaking in Hollywood these days. Every man on the street knows what's what, so I can't begin to tell you how I heard that Revolutionary Road is to be made into a film. But I can tell you that it depresses me no end. Richard Yates's novel was published in 1961, but I came across it less than five years ago, and I fell for it, hard.
Yates tells the story of Frank and April Wheeler, two young married suburbanites living in Connecticut in the 1950s, and in doing so, he performs this incredible balancing act of condemning his characters with tenderness and great sympathy.
It's a beautiful novel. Sam Mendes is directing the adaptation, and has cast his wife, Kate Winslet, and Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead parts. Anyone who ever read the book is now qualified to judge on these matters, and in my opinion, the casting of DiCaprio is great, and the casting of Kate Winslet is not. I'm a big fan of Kate Winslet, but when I first came across the character of April Wheeler, she always struck me as a more brittle type of character.
Few enough people involved in the production will lose sleep over my opinion of the cast. Apart from anything else, the extra-textual narrative involved in getting these two actors back together for the first time since Titanic is more important to the film's chance of success than anything else. In fact, I'm sure the movie pitch didn't mention the source material at all, just Leo and Kate together again. But they are messing with my relationship with the book, and I don't like it one bit.
I did not hate Road to Perdition. I do not think Sam Mendes is the worst pair of hands to take on an adaptation of this favourite book of mine (I think perhaps that distinction belongs to Ron Howard). Still, it would be better if Revolutionary Road were never filmed at all.
I'm not being a snob here. It's not about wilfully keeping it secret. I knew nothing about the novel - or the equally moving Yates novel The Easter Parade - until they were recommended to me by a friend.
I have no ownership of Yates's work, and I have no reason to prevent anyone else from reading it - I buy copies of it for friends of mine. When it comes to our relationship with art of any kind, I learned my lesson years ago when I asked a friend if I could borrow a copy of White Light, White Heat by the Velvet Underground. He told me "I don't share my music," and even as a 12-year-old, I knew that this was a deeply bogus belief of his.
Still, when I walk into the book shop next year and I see Revolutionary Road reprinted with a glossy portrait of the stars on the jacket, I will know that something has ended and, as with all relationships, it'll be sad for a while. Later, new books will come along to replace it. There seems not to be any limit to the amount of great writing in the world, and already, I feel about Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris as I once did about Revolutionary Road. Before that, it was Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld, and before that Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer was a big one for me (and is also being filmed, this time by Sean Penn).
Looking into the future, maybe I'll feel this way about Your Body Is Changing by Jack Pendarvis, which I ordered from Amazon and am waiting to find upon my doorstep. Still, as with relationships, you never forget your first one, and no book will ever again dominate the landscape of my heart like The Catcher in the Rye once did.
The best directors can take an okay novel, and from it, deliver a filmed masterpiece. Ernest Lehman's novella The Sweet Smell of Success rightly lives in the shadow of the film. I've never read the book of Sideways. Other directors can take great source material and make a film that even surpasses the heights of the great book. The Godfather is a cracking read, but who can say that Coppola's film did the novel any disservice? As far as I'm concerned, Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain and The Ice Storm each transcend their source material by a clear distance.
And yet nobody has yet filmed The Catcher in the Rye. I'm sure there's a simple reason for that. I'm sure plenty of directors have attempted to cast Macaulay Culkin or Andrew McCarthy as Holden Caulfield down the years. I'm sure that the notoriously reclusive author has a legal apparatus in place to block any filmed adaptation, and if so, I appreciate why he has taken such steps to protect his legacy.
Thinking about it now, maybe I only remain so attached to the memory of the book some 23 years after first reading it, because that memory was never ruined on film. Woody Allen famously remarked that he would like to achieve immortality by not dying, but if this can't be the case, writing a great novel that was never compromised in any way is a good way to achieve it.
It is wrong of me to judge the film of Revolutionary Road before it is completed, but when I do anticipate it, an image forcefully presents itself in my mind. It has nothing to do with what happens within the pages of the book, but everything to do with what is happening in Connecticut as we speak. The image is that of Sam Mendes, his producers, his managers and his agents, all piled on top of a unicorn. The animal is buckling, yet they dig their spurs into its flank, forcing it to perform tricks for the peanut gallery.
John Butler blogs at http://lozenge.wordpress.com