2001: A Beautiful Mind

Screenplay by Akiva Goldsman
Adapted from the book A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar

Brilliant mathematician John Nash came up with some theorems that ultimately completely changed modern economics, but also suffered from schizophrenia.

I really can't summarize any better than that because the book and the movie are so completely different. If it weren't for the name John Nash and a few of the specific mathematical theorems, it wouldn't be immediately apparent that they were about the same man. The book is a fairly comprehensive biography. The author seems to have interviewed nearly everyone who ever knew Nash in order to include their observations and insights into his life. The movie, on the other hand, is mostly from Nash's perspective. Readers of the book see his illness the way people who knew Nash observed its affects on him; viewers of the movie experience it with him.

When I blogged about this movie during my Best Picture project (here), I didn't even want to mention his schizophrenia because it's such a plot twist. His delusions are presented as factual until suddenly he's in a mental hospital and surprise! A bunch of the characters aren't even real. In the book, though, from the very beginning allusions are made to his forthcoming psychotic breaks, so it definitely doesn't seem like a spoiler anymore. The movie makes his delusions much more coherent than they were described in the book. Although the things movie Nash says don't really make sense because the people he's talking about aren't really there, they still remain logical and easy to follow. In the book, he isn't described as having visual hallucinations at all; he does hear voices, but mostly he just has these feelings and ideas that he needs to do things like give up his passport or write letters to important people or go to Europe. The way they adapted this is a great example of making changes to suit a different medium. Trying to demonstrate what actually happened to Nash on screen would have been nearly impossible. Visual hallucinations, however, work very well in movies, and by showing things from his perspective, what could have been a dry biopic becomes a suspense thriller. So while this makes for a completely inaccurate portrayal of Nash's experiences, it also makes for a fascinating movie.

It's not just the details of his illness and the way it's conveyed to the audience that the movie changed; most of the other aspects of his life are completely different as well. Movie Nash is portrayed as very socially awkward, particularly around women, although he desperately wants to sleep with them. The author of the book, on the other hand, implies that Nash was really more attracted to men than to women, describing several homosexual romances. He also fathered a child with a woman whom he said he intended to marry but never did, choosing instead to marry Alicia - his only romantic interest in the movie. The film also neglects to mention that John and Alicia got divorced when he kept refusing treatment and became violent toward her and their son (who later also developed schizophrenia, another fact not mentioned in the film). Once Nash started behaving more rationally, he did move back in with Alicia, but at the time the book was published, they had not gotten remarried. Interestingly, they did remarry in 2001, and I have to wonder how much the movie coming out had to do with that. Anyway, obviously one wouldn't expect a feature film to go into all the sordid details of someone's life, but it was strange to go from a book about a man who pursued other men, and occasionally women, to a movie about a man who is very into women but clueless about how to find a mate. Hollywood straight-washing at its finest.

Coming up next: The Pianist, based on the memoir by Władysław Szpilman

2000: Traffic

Screenplay by Stephen Gaghan
Adapted from the teleplay Traffik by Simon Moore

Several different aspects of drug trafficking are explored through the stories of the sellers and buyers perpetuating it as well as the law enforcement and politicians trying to stop it.

Traffik is a 6-hour British mini-series that focuses on smuggling drugs from Pakistan into Germany and the UK, whereas Traffic is a 2-and-a-half-hour American movie that focuses on smuggling drugs from Mexico into the US. So while for the most part the storylines were fairly comparable, many of the details were altered to facilitate the change in location, or simplified to facilitate the change in length. Overall, the stories about the politician waging a war on drugs with a daughter who's an addict, about the drug lord disguising as a legitimate businessman whose wife struggles to take over for him when he's arrested, and about the police obsessed with catching the wife, are quite similar in both versions. However, both versions also have another storyline that is barely recognizable as equivalent, and what the movie did with it kind of bothered me.

The mini-series focuses quite a bit on Pakistan, and how easy it is for poor farmers to make a lot of money growing opium there. It follows one farmer in particular, who is forced to find other work when his opium fields are burned, and ends up working for a heroin manufacturer/distributor who deals with the businessman who was arrested. I thought it was very interesting how the mini-series, while mostly portraying the horrors of heroin, also pointed out that trying to get at the root of the problem by going after poor farmers is both counter-productive and cruel. The movie's equivalent storyline is about police in Mexico who find out that the head of the army, who is professedly cracking down on the drug cartels, is really in league with one of them, and is just helping them wipe out the competition. It seemed to me that the movie missed an opportunity to explore the earlier stages of the drug trade and how those people were affected by changes in policy, as the mini-series did so effectively. The movie doesn't really ever show where the drugs originally come from, which was a huge part of the source material. So I was a little disappointed in that.

Otherwise, though, I thought this was a pretty good adaptation. It was fascinating to note the things that had to be modified, and the things that could stay the same, given the change from Europe and the Middle East to North America. I liked how the mini-series went more in-depth, but I also liked how the movie kept the story moving (it certainly didn't feel as long as it was). So both versions work.

And now my respite from movies I've blogged about before must come to an end with Best Picture winner A Beautiful Mind, based on the book by Sylvia Nasar. So stay tuned for that.

1999: The Cider House Rules

Screenplay by John Irving
Adapted from the novel The Cider House Rules by John Irving

The only significant business left in the former milling town of St. Cloud's, Maine is the orphanage, run by Dr. Larch. In addition to being a place for unwanted children to wait for adoption, it is also one of the few places for women to have safe (though illegal) abortions. Homer Wells was born in the orphanage, and after multiple failed adoptions it becomes clear that he is meant to stay. Dr. Larch begins to train Homer as his assistant, but Homer refuses to perform abortions. When a beautiful young woman shows up with her boyfriend to have an abortion, the smitten Homer decides it's finally time to leave, and he joins them to work at the boyfriend's apple orchard.

Of the winning screenplays that were written by the author of the source material, this is probably the least faithful. The novel is quite long, and rich with intriguing characters and intricate storylines, so all of it would have been way too much for a feature film. Major cuts had to be made. Irving must have realized this and decided that he would rather control what was omitted than let someone else do it. Going straight from reading the novel to watching the film was hard for me because a lot of my favorite aspects of the book didn't make it into the movie, but to one who hasn't just read the book, the movie doesn't feel like anything's missing. Any holes or gaps left by missing characters and plotlines were carefully filled and smoothed over with various modifications. The aspects that were essential to the heart of the story remained, even while the details surrounding them were significantly altered. It's really quite remarkably well done, all things considered.

Apart from the omission of Melony, who was possibly my favorite character in the book (although I kind of get why they cut her out), the only change that really bothered me was the passage of time. In the book, Homer leaves St. Cloud's before World War II starts, and doesn't return for about 20 years. In the movie, he leaves during the war, and returns about two years later. While condensing the timeline like this helped facilitate the removal of several characters and events, it just made everything in the movie seem a little too abrupt. Homer spends a lot of the book sort of treading water before he comes to his senses, and obviously the movie didn't need to show all of that, but it could have kept a little more of the "waiting and seeing". He just seems to completely change his personality a little too quickly to be believable. But for the most part, it works, and I think, while I like the book better, the adaptation was as good as it could possibly be given the constraints of a feature film. I think if I had written this novel I would never have been able to part with so much of the story to write a screenplay, but I guess that's why John Irving has an Oscar and I don't.

Well, A Star Is Born didn't win, but Blackkklansman did, which is what I was hoping would win Best Picture, so I'm excited to have an excuse to read that book in the near future. But I still have 18 more winners before I get to that one, starting with Traffic, which was the first winner based on a miniseries.

1998: Gods and Monsters

Screenplay by Bill Condon
Adapted from the novel Father of Frankenstein by Christopher Bram

Upon returning home from the hospital after a stroke, James Whale, a retired director best remembered for his monster films including Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, finds himself losing his grasp on reality and haunted by memories of his carefully buried past. One of the few things keeping him in the present is Clay Boone, a former marine now working as Whale's gardener. The two very different men develop a strange and unlikely relationship.

For the most part, this was a very consistent adaptation. Most of the dialogue was taken directly from the book, and the characters all behaved almost exactly as they were described. Whale has more and longer flashbacks in the book, but the movie keeps enough of them to get the point across. In the book, a flashback generally took an entire chapter, whereas in the movie they're often just a few seconds, but if done right a few seconds of film can be just as powerful as several pages of novel, and that was definitely the case here. James and Clay reveal quite a bit about themselves to each other in the book, but they reveal even more in the movie because there wasn't really any other way to convey their thoughts to the audience. For example, in the book, the narrator tells us fairly early on that Clay's appendix burst while he was still at Camp Pendleton, resulting in a medical discharge from the marines before he really had time to serve. Book Clay never tells Whale this, allowing the former director to believe that he fought in Korea, but movie Clay does tell him toward the end, because the audience had no way of knowing this otherwise.

While I feel like most changes were necessary due to the change in medium, there were two major unnecessary changes I noticed, one of which I really liked, and the other of which I really didn't. The change I liked was the epilogue that the movie added, showing Clay several years later. That was sweet, and emphasized how much the events of the story impacted Clay's future. But what I didn't like was that the movie changed Whale's housekeeper from a Mexican woman named Maria into a European woman named Hanna. Beyond the change of race and nationality, the two women had pretty much the exact same lines and exact same attitude, but this change bothered me because there was literally no reason to take the one character of color and make her white, but they did it anyway. If this was an isolated incident it wouldn't be a big deal, but seeing this right after watching what L.A. Confidential did to Inez Soto, and knowing that Hollywood whitewashing still happens all the time, just made me angry. Overall, though, I'd categorize this as a faithful adaptation of a story that I didn't love, but am not sorry I had the excuse to read and watch.

The Oscars are tomorrow, and even though I haven't seen it I'm low-key rooting for A Star Is Born to win in this category because I think it would be fun to watch all four versions back to back and blog about them. But I think I'll be fine with whatever wins, unlike last year (NOT looking forward to Call Me By Your Name). I still have a little ways to go before I'm caught up, but I should definitely make it before next year's ceremony, so that's exciting. Thank you to all 5 of you who have stuck with me through my longest blogging project yet. My next step is to finish off the 1990s with The Cider House Rules, based on the novel by John Irving.

1997: L.A. Confidential

Screenplay by Curtis Hanson & Brian Helgeland
Adapted from the novel L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy

Three cops in 1950s Los Angeles - brainy, ambitious Ed Exley; brawny, vengeful Bud White; and flashy, glory-driven Jack Vincennes - each separately become entangled in a web of seemingly unrelated crimes. Despite their differences and rivalries, these three must work together to figure out exactly what's happening and how to stop it.

This must have been a very tricky adaptation to pull off. The novel is so long and its plot is so complex that any movie encompassing the entirety of it would have to be about eight hours long. Obviously, some of the story had to be omitted. However, everything is so carefully woven together in the novel that if anything was simply removed, the story would no longer make sense. Each elimination required modification in the remaining scenes to accommodate it. Since I had never seen this movie before, at first I kept yelling at the screen things like, "Wait, what?! That's not who was supposed to die then! What happened to this other character?" But after a while, I figured out what they were doing, and I kind of got on board with it. The novel does have an awful lot of characters, and I'm still not sure I fully understand exactly how all of them tied into what was going on, and I kept getting people mixed up. The movie has way fewer characters, so some of the people who stayed had to take on additional roles. For example, in the novel, some random ex-cop was murdered in the Nite Owl Massacre, which was changed to Bud's former partner in the movie. Both versions include a Nite Owl victim having murdered someone else soon before being murdered himself, but in the book this is someone who was not a cop, whereas in the movie it's once again Bud's former partner. By modifying the story in this way, the movie is like the book in that everything is tied together, but the movie's web is much smaller and tighter than the novel's.

While for the most part, the film is consistent with, though not quite the same as, the book, there were a few changes that significantly altered things in a way that bothered me. The thing that I'm most annoyed about is what the movie did to Inez Soto. In the book, Inez Soto is super important. She has affairs with both Ed and Bud, she rebuilds her life despite suffering major trauma, and is one of the few characters you can actually consistently root for. In the movie, she's in two scenes and has like three lines. I don't even remember if they ever say her name; she's mostly just referred to as "the rape victim". Now, to be fair, since the movie killed off Ed's dad, and much of Inez's story is tied to Ed's dad's story in the book, a lot of what she does became unnecessary and irrelevant. I just couldn't help noticing that the woman of color's role was drastically reduced, while Lynn, the Veronica Lake look-alike, got to do almost everything on screen that she did on the page. Typical Hollywood.

There were definitely aspects of both the book and the movie that I strongly disliked, but for the most part I found them interesting to read and watch. Despite being set over 60 years ago, the story is still disgustingly relevant. Much of it centers around policy brutality, particularly directed toward people of color, which is obviously still a major problem, and instead of trying to fix it, the powers that be insist on pretending they think the issue is about the national anthem. Then there's the character of the actor who, at least in the book, molests teenage boys, and everyone kind of knows about it but keeps it quiet. This isn't in the movie, but a certain actor who was recently exposed for doing that is, and I'm still cringing.

Next up: Gods and Monsters, based on the novel by Christopher Bram

1996: Sling Blade

Screenplay by Billy Bob Thornton
Adapted from the short film Some Folks Call It a Sling Blade written by Billy Bob Thornton

Abused, developmentally disabled Karl Childers has been in a psychiatric hospital since he was about 12, when he killed his mother and her lover. Now, he is set to be released, whether he's ready or not.

A couple of earlier winners were based on TV movies, but this is the first, and so far only, time when a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar winner was based on a short film. As such, it shouldn't be surprising that the nature of this adaptation is completely different from any I've seen so far. The plot of the short was adapted into the first 20 minutes or so of the feature film, functioning as a prologue, and the remaining two hours of the movie reveal what comes after the short ends. The movie's opening credits don't even start until after the events of the short. A viewer could almost jump straight from the short to 20 minutes into the feature without even realizing it wasn't a continuous movie. The only differences that would really prevent this are that the short is in black and white while the feature is in color, and the director of the hospital, who comes back later in the feature, is played by a different actor. Billy Bob Thornton and J. T. Walsh play the only other two characters who come back in the feature in both versions.

The short leaves viewers with two main questions: Can Karl make it in the outside world? and Will he kill again? The feature answers both those questions in a way that is both fascinating and perfectly reasonable given the way his character was established in the short. It feels as though Thornton knew exactly where he wanted to go with Karl Childers before he even wrote the short, and just needed a slightly larger budget to pull it off. So even though this movie contains about two hours of content that wasn't in the original at all, it's still one of the more faithful adaptations to win this award.

This is the second year in a row when the screenwriter who won this award also starred in the film they wrote, which is particularly interesting because I think those are the only two times that's ever happened. This is certainly the only time when someone has written both the original and the adaptation and also starred in both. Well done, Billy Bob Thornton.

Coming up next: L.A. Confidential, based on the novel by James Ellroy

1995: Sense and Sensibility

Screenplay by Emma Thompson
Adapted from the novel Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

When Mr. Dashwood dies, his estate passes on to his son from his first marriage, leaving his second wife and three daughters essentially destitute. Soon afterward, the elder two daughters, practical Elinor and passionate Marianne, each fall in love, but their lack of fortune and a few other twists of fate place several obstacles in their paths to marriage.

As always when a novel is adapted into a feature film, several details had to be omitted. A few characters were completely eliminated, most notably Lady Middleton, whose husband is said to be a widower in the film, although she is very much alive in the book, and all of her children, as well as the elder Miss Steele, whose existence is never mentioned in the movie; Lucy is assumed to be an only child. Although their inclusion in the novel greatly enhanced its comedic value, they didn't really enhance the plot much, and the few ways in which they did were flawlessly transferred to other characters in the film. There were a couple of significant events in the book which did not take place in the movie, but a few other events were slightly altered to make them no longer necessary, which I thought was well done. For example (spoiler alert), in the book Willoughby shows up when Marianne is ill to explain himself to Elinor, whereas in the movie he doesn't, but earlier when Colonel Brandon tells her more details of Willoughby's villainy, the movie has him include some of Willoughby's justification, thereby eliminating the need for Willoughby's return.

The movie also added some things that weren't in the book that I appreciated. The third daughter, Margaret, is relatively unimportant in the novel, but the movie gives her more of a personality. Similarly, though the book makes it clear that Elinor likes Edward Ferrars at the beginning, it doesn't show why, at least to the extent that the movie does. The novel briefly describes his personality, but the film adds specific incidents to show what he's like, all of which are perfectly in line with the book's description. I find it particularly interesting that he is shown to interact with Margaret so much, since they were both somewhat underdeveloped in the novel. Furthermore, in the movie Edward is on the point of telling Elinor his secret before she moves away, whereas in the book Elinor doesn't have any idea until Lucy Steele springs it on her.

Overall, though the two versions have many differences, the characters and the heart of the story remain consistent, making this, in my opinion, definitely one of the better adaptations to have won this award. The eliminations didn't significantly detract from the story, and the additions enhanced it. Why can't all adaptations be this good?

Next up: Sling Blade, the first, and so far only, Best Adapted Screenplay winner that was based on a short film