2014: The Imitation Game

Screenplay by Graham Moore
Adapted from the book Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges

Brilliant mathematician and social misfit Alan Turing helps win WWII by developing a machine to decrypt German radio transmissions.

This is a difficult adaptation to analyze because the book is so long. If the movie had tried to include everything in the book, it would probably take an entire day to watch. The book encompasses most of Alan Turing's life; the movie mainly focuses on his work during the war, with a few scenes of him as a schoolboy and a few more when he's being investigated in 1951. Changing the focus like this was, in and of itself, a very good idea, and moving from the chronological presentation of the book to jumping around in time helped tie everything together well. But overall, the movie is almost laughably inconsistent with the book.

The movie uses Turing's arrest in 1951 for gross indecency as a framing device, showing him revealing the story of his wartime work to a police detective. While I understand why the filmmakers would have wanted to use him as a narrator, it kind of ruins the premise that he's good with secrets if we're seeing him reveal all this highly classified information. With all of the straight-washing I've noticed in these adaptations, it was tempting to be impressed that the film even bothered to address the reason he was arrested in the first place, but that didn't quite make up for all the emphasis that was placed on Turing's relationship with Joan Clarke. She is literally mentioned on fewer than 20 of the 664 pages of the book, but she's in a significant portion of the movie. Normally I'm all for expanding female roles, and I didn't necessarily object to the way the film exaggerated her contributions to the project, but when you're making a movie about an openly gay man, maybe don't focus quite so much on his very brief, failed engagement to a woman.

I don't mean to imply that all the changes were bad. The book mentions way too many people that I had a hard time keeping track of, so I thought the movie was right to combine or eliminate most of them; this made the story much easier to follow. Many events seemed far more dramatic on screen than they were described in the book, but this is fairly typical for adaptations, so I can't fault the movie for that. All in all, however, I found this to be one of the more disappointing adaptations to win this award. It's a fine movie, but it could have been so much better.

Coming up next: The Big Short, based on the book by Michael Lewis

2013: 12 Years a Slave

Screenplay by John Ridley
Adapted from the memoir Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup

Solomon Northup lived as a free black man in the state of New York until the year 1841, when he was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Louisiana. Twelve years later, when he was finally freed again, he wrote a memoir detailing the atrocities he had witnessed and experienced, in an attempt to convince northerners that slavery needed to be abolished.

Both the book and the movie effectively portray the horrors of slavery, but in very different ways. Often on this blog I've written about adaptations making alterations to the story to suit the change of medium, but in this case, they seem to mostly suit the change of intended audience. Northup wrote his memoir for people living before the American Civil War, when slavery was still legal; the film was made for people living 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Consequently, the book has a lot of disclaimers. Northup clearly doesn't want to be too confrontational or use generalizations, so he frequently points out that he's only speaking from his own experiences, he doesn't know how things are in other slave states, etc. He's also aware that his book will be denied and many attempts will be made to discredit him, so he presents as many dates and specific verifiable facts as possible. Most of these are omitted from the movie, which makes sense because I doubt anyone in 2013 would have bothered to go to a courthouse to verify transcripts from the 1850s, although it was helpful that the book kept mentioning dates; the movie makes it rather difficult to gauge how much time is passing. The book also makes it very clear that some slaveholders were mostly good people, like his first master, Ford. The movie makes Ford a little less likable by adding a moment where Northup starts to tell him that he's actually a free man, and Ford cuts him off, saying he can do nothing to help him. This was not in the book, and Northup actually speculates that Ford might have helped him if he hadn't been too afraid to talk to him.

Though the book describes many disturbing scenes in great detail, the movie is more explicit in a lot of ways that reflect the changing times, particularly with regards to profanity and sex. What little swearing there is in the book is censored, but not so in the movie, probably because the words "damn" and "hell" are significantly less shocking now than they were 160 years ago. Similarly, sex has become somewhat less taboo. I don't really understand why the movie adds that weird sex scene at the beginning, especially because I'm not sure who the woman even was, but nothing like that happens in the book. Masters raping their slaves is certainly implied and hinted at in the book, while it is much less vague in the movie. That change I do think was necessary and important. I don't think the book was intending to tiptoe around the subject, but I think if the movie hadn't shown it, critics probably would have accused the filmmakers of doing so.

As usual, a few scenes from the book didn't make it into the movie, including one very interesting section when Northup runs away into the bayou, but overall the film does a decent job of capturing the story. The book is a fascinating read, particularly from a historical perspective, and I feel like it should be required reading in American history classes. Since it isn't, or at least wasn't when I was in school, I'm glad this project gave me an excuse to read it.

Next up: The Imitation Game, based on a very long biography of Alan Turing by Andrew Hodges. I know last year I assumed I would be all caught up by the next Oscars ceremony, but considering how much I've slowed down and how early the Oscars are this year, it's looking like that probably won't happen. But we'll see.