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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

OGIC: Rank adaptation

October 24, 2003 by Terry Teachout

If you picked up your copy of The Wall Street Journal today, containing Terry’s stage review, then you can also read John Lippmann on the disappointing reception the adaptation of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain met with at the Toronto Film Festival last month, and the attendant nervous scurrying of its marketers at Miramax. By “disappointing,” I mean “mixed,” since Miramax sets the bar high for critical response to its movies–especially the ones it releases in Oscar-bait season.


If you don’t have the paper, here’s the gist of the piece:

But now, a week before the movie has opened, the buzz has pulled back from a surefire Best Picture Oscar nomination. The film’s engine began to sputter at the Toronto Film Festival last month, which has become a major showcase for films with Academy Award aspirations….the word out of Toronto for “Human Stain” was less than unqualified. While it won generally positive reviews from such critics as Roger Ebert, overall reaction fell short of a sure-fire awards contender. “Acting is fine, but never quite gels,” concluded trade magazine the Hollywood Reporter. Some reviewers found fault with the unlikely casting of Nicole Kidman as a cleaning woman and even more of the selection of Mr. Hopkins to play Coleman; Variety called the choice of Mr. Hopkins “problematic.”


Why do I find this not surprising? First, because there is something depressingly predictable, almost automatic, about the rush to film a high-buzz book like Roth’s. It is inconceivable to Hollywood that there might be stories that have already found their most fitting form as books, and can be neither improved upon nor done justice to as movies. (I realize that the very idea that this, rather than profitability, is a guiding interest in Hollywood is absurdly naive.) Second, because I very recently read The Human Stain, guessing that I would probably end up seeing the movie and wishing to have an unadulterated experience of a book that came highly recommended from many quarters.


I finished the novel with mixed feelings, about which more in a later post. For now I’ll just say that what strengths it has are not narrative, nor even really descriptive–to name two qualities that can make a novel genuinely ripe for screen adaptation. It is unfailingly smart and has at its core a fascinating and lifelike character study. But for all the extraordinary events in it, the novel struck me as more than a little inert. More than it narrates or describes, The Human Stain expounds and diagnoses; the less charitable verb, and the one that occurred to me repeatedly as I read it, would be “lectures.” Not, alas, an eminently filmable mode.


On the other hand, not having cared for the book actually gives me half a hope that I will like the movie. After investing scarce and valuable pleasure-reading time in the venture, I’m almost sure to go see it. It doesn’t hurt that the director, Robert Benton, brilliantly wrote and directed one of my favorites, Twilight, a modest little picture with an unbelievable cast. Since it is a trickier thing (though by no means an impossibility) for a movie to lecture than for a book to, it could just be that the process of dramatizing and illustrating this material will have breathed some life into it.

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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