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Introduction: On Adaptation
Introduction: On Adaptation
People who like a particular book often dismiss adaptations, à la, “A movie can never be as good as a book.” And that might be true. Most books, and certainly this book, are a more immersive experience than a movie, and they have more time to create a complex, multilayered world. Books can repeat themselves more, and take more twists and turns, without testing people’s patience. People generally tolerate a wider range of plots and narrative arcs in books than movies. Books can have more minor characters and subplots because we have more time to get to know them and can re-read passages to refresh our memories about them. So adaptations usually streamline, eliminate flourishes and duplications, and focus on telling a story in a way that fits audiences’ expectations.
But commentary on an adaptation gets really boring really fast if all it says is that the movie simplifies the book, and I probably won’t spend much time in the commentaries that follow picking at these kinds of decisions. What I try to think about when it comes to adaptations is how the artists involved accommodate the shift from one medium to another. I tend to want adaptations to keep the overall thrust of the characters and story intact (although there is one French adaptation of Les Misérables that makes for a gorgeous exception to this), and not to change their meaning(s) drastically without a good reason. But within limits, of course an adaptation will be different from the original. Beyond that, most of the difference between an acceptable adaptation and a great one is about this: just as a book can do things that a movie can’t, a movie can do things that a book can’t. So what particular tools are in a movie’s toolbox? Briefly, the non-verbal -- things like images, sounds and music.
In the case of Les Misérables, this can be a great opportunity, because a lot of Hugo’s narration is visual and auditory, and in ways that are interesting and creative. Filmmakers can not only use his physical descriptions as a guide, but they can (if they choose) emphasize the things that are strange about them. Think of the description of the Gorbeau House, or the Petit-Picpus convent. These places are weird in ways that an adaptation could really take advantage of. Hugo is also unusually adept at using what the characters see and hear (which may or may not be entirely real) to tell us something that can’t be seen -- when Jean Valjean sees the light pass across the sleeping Bishop’s face, for example, or hears the voices speaking to him during the Tempest in a Skull chapter. Éponine hidden in shadow outside the rue Plumet gate. Jean Valjean in prison “looking up” and “seeing” all of society above him, crushing him. Marius reading about Napoleon’s (and his father’s) exploits and “seeing” them come to life. We could go on and on. Each of these examples is told through the point of view of one of the characters and presented as something they perceive, but its meaning is larger than that. The narrator bypasses the characters to do this sometimes too, invoking the reader’s senses to do construct the same sorts of un-real experiences. Some of these are the same descriptions of places that just seem weird at first -- turns out, they’re weird because Hugo has prioritized some other meaning over creating a place that seems real. But sometimes it’s subtler than that, and he has infused places that don't seem all that strange with extra layers of meaning, through his details and his language. For example, in the rue Plumet garden, we have that description where it’s bursting with life, and everything is trying to reproduce. That’s not so weird for a garden in spring, and it gives the place descriptive richness, certainly. But it also tells us something about Marius and Cosette that would be unseemly (especially in the 19th century) to say another way.
A good, smart, adaptation, in my opinion, would take advantage of these opportunities to get more of the book into its interpretation. Each of these would take just a few seconds of the film to establish, it seems to me, and those few seconds would do most of what the corresponding passages in the book do. A picture, in this case, really could be worth a thousand words.
In the many, many adaptations that have been made of Les Misérables, I'm not aware of one that does exactly what I'm imagining here -- if anyone with the know-how and connections to make film or TV wants to collaborate to do this, I'm so in, just click "Contact" above!!
In the meantime, I'll be commenting on a few of the best-known attempts.
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