Sam Adams
How Hollywood guts children’s classics
"Gulliver's Travels" is just the latest movie to eviscerate its source material. Tim Burton, we're looking at you
A still from "Gulliver's Travels" A staple of freshman English classes and a classic of Juvenalian satire, Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” has been pored over for centuries — and yet, so far as I can determine, no one in all that time has suggested that Swift’s essay would be improved by the addition of robots.
But that’s exactly what Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” gains in its most recent movie version, which stars Jack Black as a loudmouth underachiever who works in the mail room of a New York newspaper. Black’s Gulliver — everyone calls him by his surname, owing perhaps to the fact that his first name is Lemuel — doesn’t have much in the way of ambition, but he is nursing a fierce crush on one of the paper’s editors (Amanda Peet). He finally works up the courage to ask her on a date, but chickens out at the last second, and in order to explain his presence in her office, he awkwardly puts in for a travel-writing assignment (get it?).
So far, so nothing like Jonathan Swift. Gulliver does eventually make his way to the kingdom of Lilliput, whose diminutive residents are permanently at war with nearby Blefuscu, and makes himself useful by singlehandedly dispatching the Blefuscunian navy. But that’s about all that remains of Swift’s 1729 novel. Well, that and a scene in which Gulliver extinguishes a fire raging through the Lilliputian king’s castle by voiding his bladder on the royal residence.
The movie industry has a long history of raiding literature, great or otherwise, for inspiration and then discarding whatever parts of the original don’t fit into a preestablished mold; readers of L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” would be hard-pressed to recognize large chunks of the 1939 film. But in the case of “Gulliver’s Travels,” the gulf between page and screen is vast, yawning — abysmal, even.
The particulars of Swift’s satire — references to the contemporary relations between England and France, or the conflict between the Whig and Tory parties — are obscure to most modern readers. But his absurdist take on political squabbling needs no context. The ages-old strife between Lilliput and Blefuscu, Gulliver discovers, is owed to an irreconcilable debate over whether the large or small end of an egg should be broken first before eating.
In place of the novel’s acid satire of human nature, the movie gives us a sequence in which Gulliver, having vanquished the Blefuscans and become the hero of Lilliput, puts the kingdom’s grateful people to work building him a replica of Times Square, with every billboard remade to feature his likeness: “Gull Side Story,” “Gavatar” and the like. Not only is that not satire; it barely qualifies as humor.
This is hardly the first time “Gulliver’s Travels” has been faithlessly adapted; from watching most movie versions, you’d never suspect that Gulliver’s sojourn among the Lilliputians occupies only one of the novel’s four parts. But given how little resemblance the film bears to its ostensible source, the question is, why bother at all? Swift’s book is in the public domain and thus free for the uncredited plundering, and it’s doubtful the title has any resonance among the movie’s target audience. At the Vermont multiplex where I saw it the day after Christmas, a teenage boy in the lobby was trying to talk his friends into seeing the movie. “Gulliver[cq] Travels,” he said, adding hopefully, “Jack Black.”
It’s not worth getting worked up over a standard-issue dumbing-down, but this is more like an evisceration, hollowing out the source so only a shell remains. Director Rob Letterman and writers Joe Stillman and Nick Stoller fill the void with stock love plots and a tepid self-empowerment plot that ends with Black’s Gulliver doing battle with — yes — a giant robot.
Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” did much the same with Lewis Carroll’s classic, featuring a grown-up Alice returning to Wonderland — or make that Underland, since the film’s conceit is that Alice, having visited as a child, has since forgotten or misremembered many of the details. Linda Woolverton, who also co-wrote scripts for “Mulan” and “The Lion King,” converts Carroll’s morbid whimsy into a tepid Joseph Campbell myth, in which Alice must defeat the Red Queen and slay the Jabberwock. Or rather, and it pains me to write this, “the Jabberwocky,” as it’s called in the film. As anyone who’s read “Through the Looking Glass” knows, “Jabberwocky” is the poem about the Jabberwock, not the beast itself, but since more people have heard of “Jabberwocky” than read it, Woolverton eliminates any potential for confusion, or thought. The half-second it might take the viewer to process the source of that extra “-y” is time Burton could be searing their eyeballs with gaudy CGI.
“Alice in Wonderland” is a children’s book, and “Gulliver’s Travels” has become (erroneously) thought of as one, but in their original forms, they’re filled with ideas that children have to grow into, rather than predigested narratives whose main purpose is to keep them from fidgeting in their seats. They have the form of fables, but their only moral is not to try too hard. The film adaptations of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia novels at least hold onto their Christian subtext — “We have nothing if not belief,” says Reepicheep the talking mouse in “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” — but they’re too flatly transcribed to have any emotional affect, or to transmit their ideas as anything but obscure allegory. I imagine it’s possible to sit children down after the fact and explain to them that Aslan is Jesus and so forth, but that leaves room for backlash: As a child, I devoured the novels, but I felt betrayed when told after the fact that I’d unknowingly consumed a religious text. It was like being told the delicious cake I’d just finished was laced with Brussels sprouts.
It doesn’t have to be that way. The day after watching “Gulliver’s Travels” alone, my nieces and I went to see “Tangled,” Disney’s reworking of the Rapunzel tale. As with “Gulliver’s Travels” and “Alice in Wonderland,” the Grimm’s fairy tale is treated as raw material, woven into a plot in which the imprisoned girl is a kidnapped princess whose magic hair keeps her captor perpetually young. The familiar elements of the Disney formula fall neatly into place, from the soaring Alan Menken ballads to Rapunzel’s sassy nonhuman sidekick (here, a chameleon named Pascal). But while it lacks the Grimm’s morbid detail — no eyes poked out by thorns here — “Tangled” is still a horror story, with the terrifying faux mother Gothel (voiced by Donna Murphy) at its core. Gothel has raised Rapunzel to believe she is her mother, and keeps the girl housebound by filling her with tales of the outside world’s evils. Alternately cajoling and threatening her surrogate daughter, proclaiming her love and undermining her sense of self-worth, she’s the wicked witch as mommie dearest, a master of emotional abuse who knows the scars that last are those on the inside. It’s possible parents may find her more frightening than children — my nieces were more shook up by “How to Train Your Dragon” — but her character makes the movie real in a way that the others studiously avoid. It’s the only animated movie of the three, but also the only one that feels anything like real life.
Sofia Coppola: Not just for girls
Interview: The director of "Somewhere" talks about her manly new film and the critical backlash against her work
Sophia Coppola It’s fitting that Sofia Coppola’s new movie is called “Somewhere,” an apt title for a filmmaker whose works are grounded in a sense of place and yet feel as if they’re taking place in their own hermetically sealed world. The same qualities that got “Lost in Translation” lauded for its dreamy atmosphere prompted attacks on “Marie Antoinette” for being cosseted and self-indulgent, which had more to do with critics’ sympathies toward the former’s melancholy May-December romance and their hostility to the feminine frippery of the latter than any profound shift between the two. (Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review of “Marie Antoinette” remains one of the most sexist pieces of criticism I’ve ever read.) A few of the same brickbats have been lobbed at “Somewhere,” but in the main the story of divorced action-movie star Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) bottoming out at the Chateau Marmont has met with a warmer reception, winning the top prize at the Venice Film Festival.
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Kelly MacDonald in "Boardwalk Empire" As “Boardwalk Empire” heads into its home stretch — two episodes left! — the long-simmering mixture is coming to a boil. The key thread in “The Emerald City” is Nucky’s decision to move against the D’Alessios, with the help of the defecting Mickey Doyle. Having blown his chance at betraying Nucky Thompson, Mickey wants to try his hand at selling out Arnold Rothstein, who’s using the D’Alessios to get Nucky out of his way.
Mickey tells Nucky that Meyer Lansky’s attempt to buy off Chalky White (who, let’s not forget, took Mickey’s place after Nucky cashiered him) was a ruse to determine the size of Chalky’s operation. The idea is for Chalky to play along, overstating the amount he can handle so that all of the D’Alessios show up, and then wipe them out in one swift blow. But the D’Alessios’ loose lips and Chalky’s rage derail the plan. During their initial meeting, one of the D’Alessios, flush with excitement over their bogus deal, tells Chalky they’ll make him rich enough to own “a Packard for every day of the week.” Perhaps Chalky’s figured out by now that the young man who was lynched while loading Chalky’s car was meant to be him, or perhaps he’s just put off by their gloating familiarity, but it’s enough to start the wheels turning, and fast. Next thing you know, the three men are tied up on their knees, and a short while later, the two D’Alessios are dead, leaving Meyer Lansky to report back to Rothstein. (Incidentally, the scene demonstrates the wisdom in Terence Winter’s contention that using too many historical figures robs the story of tension. Even when there’s a gun pointed at Meyer’s head, you know he’s going to survive; he still has to become Meyer Lansky. Same goes for Nucky’s promise to make Rothstein “the richest corpse in New York.”)
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