1986: A Room with a View

Screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Adapted from the novel A Room with a View by E. M. Forster

Traveling in Italy, Miss Lucy Honeychurch and her chaperone/cousin, Miss Charlotte Bartlett, find themselves assigned to rooms without the view they were promised. Mr. Emerson and his son, George, have the audacity to offer to switch rooms in a rather improper manner, and thus an unconventional acquaintance is formed. When Charlotte comes upon George kissing Lucy, she whisks her cousin away. Upon her return to England, Lucy becomes engaged to the pompous and respectable Cecil Vyse, but finds it harder and harder to convince herself she's in love with him when the Emersons move nearby.

A Room with a View is everything that Out of Africa is not: the book is a relatively quick read and the film is a relatively faithful adaptation. I was delighted that most of the novel's chapter names were included on the screen, since they were pretty fun, my personal favorites being "Chapter VI: The Reverend Arthur Beebe, the Reverend Cuthbert Eager, Mr Emerson, Mr George Emerson, Miss Eleanor Lavish, Miss Charlotte Bartlett and Miss Lucy Honeychurch Drive out in Carriages to See a View; Italians Drive them" followed by "Chapter VII: They Return", as well as the many "Lying to ____" chapters. My other two favorites ("Chapter IV: Fourth Chapter" and "Chapter XII: Twelfth Chapter") were sadly absent, but we can't have everything. Including the chapter names emphasized how closely the film followed the novel. A few minor scenes were cut or altered, but on the whole the story and characters were quite consistent.  Probably the biggest change I observed was that Charlotte was more likable in the movie than in the book. That could have been partly because I find it very difficult to dislike sassy Maggie Smith, but it was mostly because the movie blatantly shows her softening significantly at the end in a way that the book only has other characters speculate about, so she's far less ambiguous on screen than on the page.

I find it rather interesting that the screenplay was written by a woman while the novel was written by a man. The story itself is rather sexist, so of course the movie is, too, but I noted that some of the book's more sexist observations were omitted from the film, though in fairness the 78-year gap between when they were written could have had just as much to do with that as the difference in sex of the writers did. The alteration of Charlotte's character could be interpreted as another way of making the story less sexist; the screenplay reveals her humanity while the book treats her as more of an obstacle. Not that I mean to disparage the book, because I did enjoy reading it, but I might have liked the movie slightly more for this reason. At any rate, it's very clear that Jhabvala actually read the novel she was adapting, but didn't feel constrained by it, which is what I'm always looking for in an adaptation. It's not my favorite book ever, but it's pretty good, and the adaptation more than did it justice, so I'd definitely call this a worthy win.

After the briefest of respites from Best Picture Winners, next up will be The Last Emperor, based on the autobiography of Pu Yi, which I believe was the 28th film to win both these awards. Contrary to what its title implies, it was far from the last to do so.

1985: Out of Africa

Screenplay by Kurt Luedtke
Adapted from the memoir Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen, the book Silence Will Speak by Errol Trzebinski, and the book Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller by Judith Thurman

A Danish woman moves to Kenya to marry a Swedish baron and start a coffee farm. In her many years living there, she falls in love with the country and an Englishman, but ultimately loses them both.

Much to my surprise, I didn't find this movie quite as tedious this time as when I first watched it for my Best Picture blog. It didn't drag quite as much as I remembered. However, I must say that it is one of the worst adaptations to win this award, at least in terms of consistency with the source material. In Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen/whatever you want to call her (she went by about six different names) mostly relates anecdotes from her time on the farm, only a couple of which make it into the film. She barely mentions her husband, and while Denys Finch Hatton features fairly prominently, he's far from the main focus of the book. The movie, on the other hand, is almost entirely about her love life, and much of it isn't even accurate, to the point that I feel is almost insulting, both to her memory and to her book.

I get that the movie included her getting syphilis from her husband, even though she did not mention that in her memoir, because that had a very big impact on her life, and was included in both of the other books. But she seemed more bitter toward her husband in the movie than the books described, and most people didn't know about the nature of her illness until after her death, so in the movie when she tells Denys she had syphilis and he responds with "I know," it's kind of weird that she doesn't even question how he could possibly know that. Overall the movie spent way too much time focused on her marriage and love life in general. Her husband, Bror, also seemed a lot nastier on screen than in any of the books. And almost every detail of her relationship with her lover Denys Finch Hatton - how they met, how their relationship developed, conversations they had, even how she found out about his death - is different from how it actually happened. Possibly the thing that bothered me most about the movie was Denys calling her Karen. Pretty much nobody ever called her Karen, although that was her given name, and Denys always called her Tania. One of the biographies mentioned that it was only people who tried to pretend they knew her better than they did who referred to her as Karen, so it was kind of hard not to interpret this as a sign that the screenwriter was trying to pretend he knew enough to tell her story without actually having bothered to read it.

I know I'm probably coming across as unnecessarily harsh, but after having slogged through three rather long books about these people, I feel like I know them quite well, and this movie seems like an insult to their memory. And that goes for the Africans as well as the Europeans. Reading Out of Africa from a modern perspective, it definitely has some problematic elements, coming as it does from a colonial mindset, but Dinesen clearly cared about and respected the native African people she came in contact with, even if they were mostly her servants or subordinates on the farm built on land that was stolen from them. I can see why a movie made nearly 50 years later would find it difficult to portray some of her stories without seeming racist, but the decision to eliminate or greatly reduce the role of almost all of the African characters in order to expand a European love triangle isn't much better. And then, adding insult to injury, they couldn't even do justice to any of those three white people. Despite all this, the movie does have a few things to recommend it, and I don't hate it, but I'm almost completely certain that Isak Dinesen would have.

I cannot even begin to express how relieved I am to finally be done with this story. Next up is Room with a View, thankfully based on only one relatively short novel by E. M. Forster. So it should be significantly less than two and a half months until my next post.