Jason Bailey does good work over at Flavorwire.com, but as with anyone that has an opinion we have to disagree every now and then and in this instance it’s not what he’s written that bothers me, but his latest headline: “Who Cares If a Great Movie Like The Shining Is a Bad Adaptation?“.
How can a great movie come out of a bad adaptation? It’s a contradiction of words, and while Bailey ran with that headline, his article says as much as he tackles author Stephen King‘s objections to Stanley Kubrick‘s The Shining, which King calls “cold”, saying Jack Nicholson‘s performance painted the character crazy from the start and adding, “We’re looking at these people, but they’re like ants in an anthill, aren’t they doing interesting things, these little insects.”
Bailey, however, does a great job summing up when he writes:
[I]n adapting “The Shining”, Kubrick took King’s story and King’s character, and made it his own. Kubrick’s obligation to King was not to make a book report — it was to make an effective movie, one that worked on its own terms. This is, above all else, the job of the cinematic storyteller, fidelity to source material be damned.
“Made it his own”, that’s very important. For example, who would ever guess after watching The Twilight Saga: Eclipse it was directed by the same guy that directed Hard Candy and 30 Days of Night and executive produced and directed NBC’s “Hannibal“?
So often today this idea of remaining faithful to the source material is considered important. Obviously more with projects such as superhero movies and young adult adaptations such as Harry Potter and Twilight, the latter of which obviously made money, but is far from what anyone outside of the rabid fandom would call “good”. It didn’t have to be that way, however, had someone actually adapted the material for the big screen rather than simply moved the words from the book over to the pages of the screenplay.
The same could be said for countless “adaptations”, even to the point I think one of the year’s worst films, The Host, could have been, at the very least, decent had it gotten away from all that voiceover and either internalized the struggle of its main character a little more, or perhaps even come up with a physical manifestation of the alien intruder in some way. That, of course, would have taken a bit more work and with today’s dedication to release dates rather than quality or audience, filmmakers just can’t afford to make things too complicated.
