Adaptation

So I was watching the 1995 BBC version of Pride and Prejudice yesterday and today (the one with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth), which I had somehow never seen before, and I was astonished by how good it was. Seriously. It was one of the best adaptations I've ever seen, along with the recent Bleak House on Masterpiece Theatre. It's very hard to take a great novel and make a good movie, since they are rather different media. It's especially hard when the novel in question is more than just great, but is one of the best ever written (as is my opinion regarding Pride and Prejudice. Feel free to disagree, but then I shall seriously question your literary taste. It's just one of those things you have to love, like Hamlet and cheese pizza, and, especially, the combination thereof. End Digression).

However, you'd think that a film of a play would be a lot easier. Indeed, some rather straight play-to-film adaptations have worked very well. Alfred Hitchcock's Rope comes to mind as successful film that is almost indistinguishable in form from a stage play. In fact, the media of film and theatre seem to be close relatives. Indeed, on a certain level, they are. They're both visual forms of storytelling, with actors and directors and costumes and sets, and they both tell stories of similar length due to the fact that most human beings are only willing to sit still for so long. (That's why you can have a single novel, The Lord of the Rings, take up almost a dozen hours of film, even with a bunch of stuff cut out; novels have the luxury of telling longer stories than plays or films can, since there's no expectation that a reader will read a novel in one sitting.)

However, I think on a certain level these things are superficial. I've personally acted in a few plays myself, and also in a couple of student films, and I can tell you that the experiences were not at all similar. What works on a stage doesn't necessarily work on film, and vice versa. I could ramble on for a bit as to why I think this is the case, but I'll admit that on a certain level I don't know. I haven't thought it through enough, maybe. I'd be curious as to other people's thoughts on this. But nevertheless, no matter how distinct theatre and film are, I think that novels differ more from both of them than they do to each other.

Tying this into Shakespeare, I've seen a handful, though not all THAT many, film adaptations of Shakespeare's plays. Not a single one of them has been as good as the 1995 Pride and Prejudice adaptation. Why is that? Is it because Pride and Prejudice is about five hours long (without commercials)? Possibly, but Pride and Prejudice is simply a longer story than any of Shakespeare's plays. Is it its faithfulness to the original novel? Well, to a certain extent, but no one ever films a novel perfectly accurately, again, since they are very different media. While I think that faithfulness should be striven towards as much as the director or screenwriter thinks reasonable, simply following the text of a great novel to the letter will not lead, in and of itself, to a great film. Besides, while Shakespeare and Austen are authors of similar caliber, for some reason filmmakers think it is acceptable to alter Austen's words, but general only cut (not modify) Shakespeare's, so most adaptations are extremely faithful, unless it is one of those modern-day adaptations which ditch the original language entirely.

But, being someone who really enjoys stage performances of Shakespeare, I find that the films I've seen don't feel like true adaptations to a different medium. They're more like dilutions. I can't quite express why. Am I the only person who feels this way? Maybe I've just watched the wrong ones? The most important Shakespeare adaptation I have not seen is, shamefully, Branagh's Hamlet. I've seen bits and pieces here and there, and it looks pretty awesome, so I shall have to Netflix it now that it is on DVD. Perhaps it will change my opinion of filmed Shakespeare. We shall see.