Film Adaptations:
Would a Rose by Any Other Name… 

With several classic books being translated onto the big screen recently, including the critically lauded The Namesake, The Hours and The Painted Veil (not to mention a little series about a teenage wizard), film and literary critics alike are wondering how to push the boundaries of the art form without crossing the line.

Everyone knows the tragic ending to Romeo and Juliet, with the pair mistakenly committing suicide without getting a chance to say goodbye.

Director Baz Luhrmann adds a twist to the story in his 1996 film adaptation. In his version, Romeo drinks the poison and is preparing to die when suddenly Juliet wakes up. There is a heartbreaking pause when Romeo realizes that he has killed himself in vain and, in horror, Juliet watches him die.

This is an entirely new interpretation of the famous death scene, and it left some viewers outraged that Luhrmann had taken such liberties with Shakespeare’s classic ending. But it raises an important question: Should an adaptation be judged by its source, or should it be considered an independent work of art?

This is a question that has hounded cinema since its emergence in the late 1800s. The first films, created by the Lumière brothers, were short clips of everyday scenes, like a train passing or the bustle of a city street. But as filmmaking matured, so did the audiences. Films needed to exhibit more than city streets to attract a crowd.

Filmmakers began developing narrative structure and derived many of their subjects from popular literature. The earliest narrative films were limited to selected scenes; one of the very first adaptations, of Shakespeare’s King Lear (1899), was comprised of just a few memorable incidents from the original play. Audiences flocked to the theater for the thrill of seeing their favorite scenes brought to life on screen.

Both critics and champions of early cinema considered literary adaptation as theft. They claimed that, by stealing from other arts, filmmakers were underestimating cinema’s potential as an independent and unique form. As Virginia Woolf famously argued in her 1926 essay, “The Cinema,” about the film adaptation of Anna Karenina:

The alliance is unnatural. Eye and brain are torn asunder ruthlessly as they try vainly to work in couples. The eye says: 'Here is Anna Karenina.' A voluptuous lady in black velvet wearing pearls comes before us. But the brain says: 'That is no more Anna Karenina than it is Queen Victoria.' For the brain knows Anna almost entirely by the inside of her mind—her charm, her passion, her despair. All the emphasis is laid by the cinema upon her teeth, her pearls, and her velvet.

Despite Woolf’s scorn for the literary adaptations of her time, she suggests that by developing the capabilities that distinguish it from other arts, film would one day have the ability to reveal things that can only be clumsily described in literature. “No fantasy could be too far-fetched or insubstantial,” she wrote. And she was right.

Today, literary adaptation is a customary and often highly regarded film style—it has an Academy Award category all its own. Nonetheless, the early criticism of adaptations persists. Except now, instead of debating whether film should borrow from literature, audiences consider the question that was raised about Romeo and Juliet: Should literary adaptations portray their literary sources faithfully, or should they strive to transform literature into a different and independent work of art?

This is really a question of emotion rather than a meditation on the integrity of art. An individual’s impression of a literary adaptation depends largely on his or her emotional connection with the literary source. Some audiences flock to a film adaptation, not to watch an interpretation but to see a beloved book brought to life exactly as they had imagined it—just like those early audiences of King Lear.

Then there are films that transform a book into something different and startlingly original. John Curran’s recent adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s novel, The Painted Veil, expanded a relatively slim book into an epic romance-adventure-thriller. While Maugham’s tale is one of cold-hearted callousness and deceit in which love is markedly absent, Curran’s film hinges on a love story between two troubled yet redeemable characters.

Which is better—the faithful adaptation or the unique interpretation? Some would say that films should stay true to the texts they’re indebted to. Others argue that it’s the filmmaker’s unique interpretation that makes a literary adaptation fascinating. So who’s right? Should Juliet have waited six more seconds to open her eyes in that final scene?

The question will probably persist as long as films are adapted from literature, and that’s a good thing. The debate is just as interesting as the movies.

Lara Ehrlich is an editor at Publications International. She is also a freelance editor and a writer. Lara can be reached at lara.ehrlich@gmail.com.

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