(the 2015 film adaptation is good; you should see it) got me reflecting a bit on film adaptations. Now, you may assume, dear reader, that I’m one of those purists who thinks the book is always better than the movie, but you’d be wrong. Well, half wrong. I only usually think the book is better than the movie (but probably because I just prefer reading to watching as an experience). I’m not a film expert by any means, but for me as a reader, successful movies based on great books make artistic choices that highlight the most compelling elements of the book (be they plot, character, themes, etc.). However, every now and then a director, screenwriter, actor, or all of the above takes a big gamble and drives the story off-road. So today I’d like to discuss a few film adaptations that truly took a road less traveled by actually changing the ending.
Yes, spoilers will abound. But you’ve probably seen these movies anyways.
The Book:
Though one of Stephen King’s earlier works relatively speaking, the horror legend had already made a name for himself with his 1974 Carrie and its 1976 film adaptation when he published The Shining in 1977. It was Kubrick’s film and Jack Nicholson’s performance, however, that would make Jack Torrance haunt our nightmares.
You know the story. Writer Jack Torrance takes a seasonal job at the isolated Overlook Hotel as caretaker over the winter, while the hotel is closed and virtually inaccessible. He moves in with his wife, Wendy, and psychic son Danny. And then...well, it is a horror story.
The Gamble:
The actual change in the ending is less significant in this one than a shift in focus. In the book, Wendy and Danny are rescued from a homicidal Jack by psychic chef Dick Hallorann. The Overlook burns down with Jack inside. In the movie, the hotel survives intact but poor Dick does not, and Wendy and Danny escape alone.
But if there’s one thing you remember about this movie, it’s probably not that the hotel remains standing, or even Dick’s rather unceremonious murder. It’s probably Jack Nicholson’s eyebrows.
Sure, those twins in the hallway and that lady in the bathtub and the tide of blood were all pretty freaky, too, but in the movie Jack himself is at least as terrifying as the ghosts that are possessing him. Frankly, Kubrick leaves us to guess to what extent the Overlook even is possessing Jack and to what extent we’re simply watching him devolve into a psychopathy foreshadowed from his first appearance.
King’s Jack Torrance is more a victim of malevolent forces than he is their embodiment. The spirits of the Overlook first attempt to possess Danny for his gift, then move on to Jack when they are unsuccessful. Jack’s descent is a gradual fight for his sanity. He’s not a psychopath; he’s a tragic figure overcome by evil. His fiery death represents a final, dramatic loss of control, in stark contrast with his freezing death in the film.
The Verdict:
Well, there’s one viewer who gave Kubrick’s adaptation a decided thumbs down:
Stephen King. The author bemoaned Nicholson’s Torrance as a flat character who never truly struggles to save his sanity and Shelley Duvall’s Wendy as a misogynistic caricature.
Myself, I see King’s point. I think he’s right about Wendy at the very least, and I even see his point about Jack. But as much as I enjoy reading King, I’ve never found his strength to be psychological realism. I like King’s books because of the way he builds tension. His stories start calmly and careen towards their conclusions with a momentum that sometimes even leads him to inelegant endings bordering on the ridiculous (see: Pet Sematary), but boy, was the ride that got us there fun.
The Shining is an excellent example of King doing what he’s best at: dialing up the terror bit by bit until it explodes. The thing is, that’s exactly what Kubrick captures in his film adaptation. King does it from within Jack’s mind, and Kubrick does it from the outside. King has us experience the evil of the Overlook with Jack, whereas Kubrick makes Jack himself a source of that evil. Both work.
The Conformist (1970), Bernardo Bertolucci
The Book:
Alberto Moravia’s Il conformista (1951) came at a strange moment in Italian history and art. After two decades of fascist dictatorship followed by a world war, the allied invasion, and a civil war, Italy was rebuilding politically and economically. Moravia himself had faced censorship under the regime both for the content of his work and for his Jewish heritage. Though neorealism now dominates discussion of postwar Italian literature and cinema, Moravia’s work was surreal, psychoanalytical, and dense with symbolism.
The novel follows a fascist bureaucrat, Marcello, who wants nothing more than to be “normal” (a conformist, get it?), even at the cost of suppressing his own desires and inclinations. The prologue opens with a child Marcello killing lizards for sport. It goes on to narrate his abduction, near-assault, and shooting of his would-be abuser, a stranger named Lino. The rest of the novel narrates perhaps an even stranger scenario: Marcello is grown-up and on his honeymoon in Paris, where he is to find and kill his former professor, Quadri, now an antifascist dissident. But wait, there’s more: Marcello’s mission becomes even messier when he develops an intense attraction to Quadri’s wife, Lina (called Anna in the movie), an attraction made even more complicated by Lina’s attempted seduction of Marcello’s own bride, Giulia.
The Gamble:
In both book and movie, the story ends several years later. Marcello has achieved what he has always wanted, an outwardly unremarkable life as a paper pusher, husband, and father, when the regime falls and Marcello is faced with a probable reckoning for his own culpability in the deaths of Quadri and Lina/Anna. And in both, he has an unexpected encounter with Lino, who, as it turns out, is not dead. Now, in the book this encounter takes place in secluded woods, and what follows is a conversation about the loss of innocence. Later, Marcello and his wife and daughter are caught in an air raid as they flee Rome. The reader can presume that Marcello dies.
In the movie, Marcello happens upon Lino in a public park, and they don’t have a conversation that leads to any insight or clarity regarding Marcello’s character. Rather, Marcello makes a scene, calling the attention of passerby to Lino—the man he thought he himself had killed, remember—and accuses him of having killed Quadri and Anna. He then frantically turns on his friend, Italo, denouncing him, too, as a fascist.
The Verdict:
I have long felt that Moravia’s
The Conformist and Bertolucci’s are essentially about two different things. That is, both are about the period of Italian history lived by their creators, but those periods are different. Moravia lived both decades of the regime as an adult, while Bertolucci was a toddler when Mussolini was driven from Rome. It’s a no-brainer to read the novel as a reflection on Italy’s recent, dark past. Drawing on psychoanalysis, Moravia seeks to show how the people around him transformed their secret sins and desires (Lino and Lina couldn’t possibly have almost the same name by coincidence) into the most cold-blooded of crimes.
However, I do not believe that Bertolucci’s film is ultimately about fascism. Rather, it’s about the struggle for power and political identity that followed it. Bertolucci’s Marcello never reckons with any of the violence of his past. Rather, he buries it under others in a chaotic conclusion that comes on fast enough to leave you wondering what happened. At the time when the film was made, a country that had still not fully confronted its fascist past was just bubbling over into what would become the more than a decade of violence known as the “years of lead” or
anni di piombo. Lingering fascism was about to show itself in domestic terrorism, and in fact recently had with the
Piazza Fontana bombing, with a fallout that makes the JFK assassination look straightforward. It’s easy to imagine that Marcello’s desperate and facile yet successful lies would have resonated with viewers in 1970, who had just months earlier watched police scramble to accuse, kill, and cover up the death of
an unlikely suspect in a horrific crime.
So, which is it? While the movie is stylistically stunning and its frenzied ending a powerful expression on the anxieties of its own time, I personally am ultimately more compelled by Moravia’s struggle to understand fascism. The power structure he portrays is deeper and more sinister and his examination of it is more committed, even if to a modern reader the psychoanalytic understanding may fall flat.
Jurassic Park (1993), Steven Spielberg
The Book:
In 1990 Michael Crichton wrote a very decent science fiction novel that would go on to inspire the greatest movie ever made (don’t fight me on this one; I will die on this hill). You know the story: billionaire John Hammond and a very secretive team of scientists have managed to clone dinosaurs, and he’s about to open a theme park to showcase them. That goes about as well as you would expect. Our favs are all there: paleontologist Alan Grant, paleobotanist Ellie Sattler, and, of course, chaos theorist Ian Malcolm.
The Gamble:
The film changes the opening but otherwise follows the first half of the book quite closely and then veers gloriously off the rails. After that, the book plot involves a second power outage, wild raptor eggs, a river rafting experience (in which Universal Studios clearly saw the park ride potential), and rather more major character deaths than in the movie. The movie sticks with a more straightforward building of tension and keeps enough main characters alive to keep from scarring its younger viewers for life.
If I could sum up the main differences at the end of the day, they would fall into two categories: the deaths and the dinosaurs. Crichton spares few characters in the book. Grant and Sattler escape with the children, and pretty much everyone else gets eaten by something or other, including Hammond, lead scientist Dr. Wu, and—most tragically—everyone’s favorite chaos theorist. Crichton even kills a T. rex. As for the dinosaurs, the book’s story is largely driven by the small and chaotic Procompsognathus, whereas the movie focuses its attention on the vicious Velociraptor. (I’d suggest that kids’ pronunciation may have been a motive for this change, but who am I kidding? Children who can’t pronounce their own names can rattle off six-syllable dinosaur appellations like they learned them in the womb.)
The Verdict:
I think I’ve already made my bias clear here. The book is fine. It’s good. Had Spielberg never adapted it, it would now probably be a cult classic of sci-fi horror. But the movie is a masterpiece. Come on, don’t you remember how you felt when you first saw the T. rex? After all the allusions, after the ominous footsteps, after watching that glass of water tremble on that dashboard?
The lead-up fully prepared you to be terrified, and
damn if that scene didn’t deliver.
I don’t think the differences in deaths made the difference, either. Surely the producers saw the sequel potential and found it advantageous to rescue the park’s creator, its lead scientist, and Jeff Goldblum. But they could have killed them and still made the best movie ever. The choice to downplay the Procompsognathus is more interesting. The movie does not set the scene with the little rogue dino-demons wreaking suspicious havoc. Rather, the movie withholds our first full dino sighting until it has properly set the stage, and then it
goes big. However, in a way the movie does with the Velociraptor what the book does with the Procompsognathus. It takes a dinosaur no one had heard of (unless you watched
Dino Riders) and made it the stuff of nightmares (with certain
liberties). The Velociraptors are certainly a dangerous presence in the books, as well, but in the movie they climb from an
ominous verbal description early on to a starring role in
that scene that made you jump every time someone turned a doorknob for weeks.
So, while I generally prefer the experience of reading, I hope I’ve made a compelling argument for evaluating film adaptations on what they accomplish rather than pure fidelity. What do you think? What other film adaptations have made discussion-worthy choices? I’d love to hear your take in the comments (unless it’s an anti-
Jurassic Park take; such heresy will not be tolerated).
