WORDS MADE FLESH

More than a month after its first British television broadcast on BBC2, I finally took a deep breath and watched my recording of the movie version of Disgrace. Why the reluctance? Nothing to do with reviews, previous experience of any of the participants or the subject matter. Far from it. What reviews I have seen range from admiration for achievement to sympathy for gallantry.

The source of my misgiving was as old as cinema; indeed, older – as old as acting out, as performance. And therein lies the problem: how can a piece of prose, of storytelling, of the magic of words seeding responses in the brain (and not necessarily pictorial ones) be made to live to the same degree in the enactments of other people? In its simplest formulation: how can a dramatisation possibly do any sort of justice to fiction?

Well, you may counter: what’s a play written for the stage or radio or television or an original script written for the cinema or for a television film but a piece of enacted fiction? Of course, I respond, but the enactment – indeed the need of enactment – was imprinted in the work’s DNA. The playwright or screenwriter conceived the work and deployed its characteristics for the very purpose of being presented, spoken, clothed and fleshed by actors. The writer was never truly writing for a reader (as a novelist does) but for an actor. That’s why plays and scripts, even though they have their own dynamic and conventions that may well be interesting to examine, generally fail as literature or even as a wholly satisfactory read. Every English teacher will tell you that her class of pupils never really gets to grips with Shakespeare until they’ve made a visit to the RSC or the Bankside Globe. And the most exciting upshot of such a visit is the frequency with which pupils who were previously indifferent to the plays are now fired up and much more ready to be engaged by the printed texts.

That the writer is valued more highly in the theatre than in cinema or broadcasting speaks of the respective origins of these various forms. The stage grew up with the oral tradition of storytelling. Though no doubt there are thousands of lost theatre texts that drew on and paralleled spoken (rather than acted) narratives, a rich body of drama expressly intended for acting has survived from ancient times. Many of these plays, of course, draw on known narratives – histories of struggle and warfare, legends of heroes and divinities, folk tales and handed-down anecdotes. But they were more apt to be written out and preserved than (semi-)spoken narratives that did not exhibit the same degree of theatrical originality. And as dramatic form developed, so dramatists evolved theatrical conventions that distinguished the actor’s craft from that of the narrator.

John Michael Coetzee in South Africa

By the time recording devices of various kinds began to preserve performers’ work, there were centuries of accumulated theatre for the new mediums to draw upon. Recorded stage plays loomed far larger in the early years of film and broadcasting than they do today. Slowly the realisation dawned that ‘story’ rather than (necessarily) ‘drama’ was what most appealed to cinema and broadcasting audiences (as distinct from theatre audiences, no doubt because the live, present quality of theatre itself constitutes a drama that cannot be found in any kind of recording) and that there were many stories embedded in the culture that had not lent themselves (and perhaps could not lend themselves) to the theatre arts. But film, with its freedom to roam beyond the proscenium arch and, latterly, beyond what hitherto was physically impossible, and broadcasting with its unrivalled intimacy and its penetration into the consumer’s home each in its own way trumped the inevitable (and indeed hallowed) conventions of the stage. So nothing that a novelist could imagine was beyond the art of these mediums to realise, freed as they are (unlike the stage) from the limits of what can be done in the present in a defined space.

The dramatic arts are self-evidently expensive, especially in the employment of numbers, in a way that fiction on the page is not. Even a small-cast play is more costly to mount than a Jeffrey Archer is to publish, however well remunerated the author. So, in their constant search for thrift and profit, the dramatic arts are very apt to seek proven successes on which to risk their overheads. No more vivid evidence of this can be found than the modern demand for stage musicals to be taken from hit movies. I can trace little evidence that this practice was better than fitful following a small rash of them in the early 1950s: Make a Wish with a score by Hugh Martin (who died this spring) opened in 1951 and was based on Preston Sturges’ The Good Fairy, itself a movie version of a Molnar stage play; Hazel Flagg, Jule Styne and Bob Hilliard’s 1953 musicalisation of William A Wellman’s sour screwball comedy Nothing Sacred; and a show built upon Jacques Feyder’s adorable romp La kermesse héroïque, brought to Broadway by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke as Carnival in Flanders (also 1953).

John Malkovich as Lurie, Jessica Haines as Lucy

But I digress. The large point is that the truly original in movies and in broadcast drama is increasingly unusual. Hollywood now trades more in sequels and franchises than anything else and few of these are founded in original for-the-screen work. In its turn, teledrama is dominated by genre (including the present fad for celebrity biography) and by versions of work originating elsewhere. The industry term for taking material from non-dramatic sources is ‘adaptation’, a notion that craftily partakes of the source’s legend while keeping it at arm’s length. The official status of the term is enshrined in the distinction of Academy Award categories for original screenplay and adapted screenplay, a split introduced as long ago as 1931 when the Oscars were but four years old.

When I joined BBC Television’s long-since defunct Script Unit almost forty years ago, I was gravely informed by my mentor Betty Willingale that we did not say “adaptation” at the BBC, we said “dramatisation”. I completely understood and at once embraced the nicety of the distinction and, unlike the BBC itself, have resolutely cleaved to “dramatisation” ever since.

And it is Disgrace as a dramatisation that I propose to address. For JM Coetzee’s 1999 novel, which the 2007 movie dramatises is, to my mind, one of the very greatest works of fiction of last century and hence you may imagine the trepidation with which I approached the dramatisation. The book, Coetzee’s ninth novel, almost certainly clinched his Nobel Prize four years later and also, having been unwarrantedly controversial in his native South Africa, propelled him to emigrate to Australia. So it has been pivotal to his life as well as central in his canon.

Haines, Malkovich and intruders

The primary character of Disgrace is David Lurie, an English professor, native of and working in Cape Town. With a mixed-race student, he embarks upon an affair, about which he is in every sense casual. Accused of favouring her in exams, he acknowledges his guilt but declines to offer anything in mitigation. Duly rusticated, he motors to the remote farm of his daughter Lucy and learns that her woman lover has left some time before. An attack by youths leaves Lurie recovering from burns and Lucy pregnant by rape. Lurie is exasperated at Lucy’s fatalistic accommodation both with these events and with what land and power she accedes to her former employee. Lurie too has to learn how to accept the transfer of power. By the by, the Luries are white. The former employee and the rapists are black.

From these bare bones, it will be clear that the story resonates deeply with the shifting societal nature of post-apartheid South Africa, though perhaps less clear why the novel should have been accused on all sides of misrepresenting one interest or another. That it should have provoked such conflicting anger is testimony to the power of Coetzee’s prose, which is as spare and unsparing as most of his contemporaries’ work is indulgent and ingratiating. Little wonder that that louche child Martin Amis remarked of Coetzee’s novels: “I read one and I thought he’s got no talent”. Amis himself may have talent to burn (if you care for that sort of thing) but what he absolutely lacks is what Coetzee effortlessly deploys: art, judgment, economy of means and a profound understanding of the human condition.

Anna-Maria Monticelli

Coetzee’s work for me rules that part of the literary forest also stalked by Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy and Colm Tóibín. In the much more crowded and adulterated part, Philip Roth is justly king but many of the others (Amis is a fair example) lack their own monarch’s psychological acumen and beady detachment.

The dramatisation of Disgrace was undertaken by Anna-Maria Monticelli, an Australian sometime model and actress – not, one might be inclined to assume, the most suitable grounding from which to tackle such a project. She has been quoted as accounting for her coup in landing the rights by claiming that she “just worked harder than everyone else”. Coetzee retained script approval but elected to back Monticelli on the strength of an earlier screenplay of hers. And rather than use her good fortune as a Hollywood bargaining chip, Monticelli kept her own control by having her husband, Steve Jacobs, handle the direction.

Malkovich and friend

It’s hardly for me to pronounce on Coetzee’s wisdom (or otherwise) in entrusting the project to the Jacobses. The novelist may have had any number of motives for letting these people in. If what he most wanted was a dramatisation that served his novel faithfully, he could have done very much worse. Few movies follow their source material impeccably but this one does. Another that does – to its own and its novel source’s advantage, I think – is Joe Wright’s of Atonement, the screenplay for which, by Christopher Hampton, departs hardly at all from Ian McEwan’s novel.

Monticelli’s screenplay is fastidiously loyal to the book, save in one crucial particular. The ending is reordered so that Coetzee’s final scene – in which Lurie surrenders a stray dog, with which he has lightly bonded, to the inevitability of the vet’s needle – is switched with another – in which Lurie returns as a visitor to Lucy’s farm – and thereby creates an inaptly conclusive implication of reconciliation. I think this is a pity. Indeed, I think it does some delicate violence to Coetzee’s intentions.

Otherwise, the sense of this being the story of modern South Africa writ little comes through clearly enough in the way Monticelli orders the material and selects the dialogue. Jacobs’ contribution is more mixed. Though his camera placement is usually discreet and objective, his camera movement and his editing – creeping tracks and slow dissolves – are studied and overbearing. When the violence erupts, it lacks the subtextual inevitability that it carries in the book, where it achieves a kind of purging: “So it has come, the day of testing” [p 94, Vintage edition]. But, though it is handled with proper restraint and economy, not indulged, it must be shown to a degree in the movie. So it becomes an objective, not an imagined experience. Indeed, what Jacobs cannot help is that, while being able to present the bleak beauty of the Eastern Cape is an undoubted asset, making visible humanity of Coetzee’s severe – even parabolic – characterisations is not.

Coetzee in Australia

All the limitations of dramatising fiction are concentrated in Disgrace in the casting of David Lurie. John Malkovich is a relatively unusual American movie star in that his theatre background informs his work much more evidently than does his development as a screen actor. In that sense, he is more like a British movie performer. I first saw him in a PBS television production of Sam Shepard’s stage play True West. Two years after its San Francisco premiere in 1982, the chamber piece was mounted by the Steppenwolf Company in Chicago and then taken to Broadway, giving the company and the play’s leads – Malkovich and Gary Sinise (who also directed) – national attention. I also saw the pair as, respectively, Lennie and George in Sinise’s Steppenwolf version of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, which came to the National Theatre. In both plays, both actors were hugely compelling.

Malkovich’s screen acting generally is much more like that of, say, Ian McKellen or Ralph Fiennes than of George Clooney or Brad Pitt. In Disgrace, the work in his work is quite as evident as it is in Jacobs’ direction. Given his particular sort of intense, unaccommodating presence, the story doesn’t leave Malkovich many options beyond appearing terribly creepy. Lurie is not like that in the book, or at least it’s only one colour among many in his impact upon the reader. And surprisingly, despite Malkovich’s Methodish techniques, the least convincing shots in the whole film are the two in which he is overwhelmed by emotion.

This, I think, brings us to the greatest drawback of dramatisation. Concretising also reduces. It cuts out a whole range of possibilities. The director and the actor continually have to make film-making choices – this look, this gesture, this angle, this edit, not that. The reader, by contrast, may continuously juggle simultaneous responses. The concretising sets Lurie there and you have to come to him and take him as he is. On the page, you draw him to you and make a relationship between your own psyche and what you take from Coetzee’s prose, a much more fluid and complex engagement. In a nutshell, it tells why literature is high art and cinema popular culture.

Malkovich is appropriately seigneurial in taking for himself the girl student but the sequence where he swipes aside the attempts of the college authorities to give him a way back fails to afford the actor the chance to touch in all the contradictions and favours too much the monochrome expressions of the small-part actors set up to determine his fate. And his game but vain attempt at a cultured Afrikaans accent is a constant distraction.

The performance makes an intriguing contrast with that of Colin Firth as the English professor in Tom Ford’s movie version of the Christopher Isherwood novel, A Single Man. Paradoxically, Firth’s is a very American approach in the way that it interiorises so much of the character’s turmoil and hence makes the viewer intuit it rather than expecting to see it. Malkovich simply doesn’t do that.

Jim Sturgess, Anne Hathaway in One Day

Happily for Coetzee, his novel is secure enough to survive a movie dramatisation. Many novels are not and are eclipsed by the filmed versions so that the fact of the novel itself becomes forgotten. This is the greatest danger for a writer in selling the film rights. All book-writers should be as fortunate as Louis de Bernières. His fourth novel, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, became the carry-on-board reading of choice of 1995, the year it appeared in paperback. The much-sought movie rights were sold (no doubt for a king’s ransom) but the resultant movie – which changed the book a lot – was an utter flop. De Bernières perhaps lost nothing financially, source novelists not generally being granted a percentage. But the film is buried and the title remains in the public consciousness as that of a novel rather than of a film.

How different from Disgrace – and indeed from Captain Corelli and Atonement – will be One Day. Due for UK release on August 24th, this is the movie dramatisation of last year’s carry-on-board reading of choice. By chance, this book and Coetzee’s touch hands on one detail: tense. Disgrace is written in the present, a mannerist touch that would bother me in a lesser writer but it is Coetzee's habit in his fiction. One Day switches between present and past. If it does so with purpose, the purpose eludes me.

David Nicholls

David Nicholls’ picaresque rom-com is/was clearly written with the resultant movie constantly in mind. Indeed, I have never encountered a novel that more loudly screamed that ambition. Constructed in scenes – the title refers to the date on which the action is set over successive years – the novel is to all intents and purposes a screenplay, save that every scene is over-extended by around a third.

I am far too anal a person to raise any objection to a work having “a scheme”. Indeed Nicholls pulls a stroke close to the book’s end – in which one of the leading characters voyages back through the whole saga in reverse – that struck me as his best idea by a country mile. It will be interesting to see if that scene survives to the film. (What am I thinking of? It won’t be interesting or even ascertained because I certainly won’t be seeing the movie).

One Day: the movie poster

One Day has been the most grossly overpraised British novel since Marina Lewycka’s A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, and indeed overpraised by the likes of Tony Parsons, Nick Hornby, Richard Madeley and Judy Finnegan, the kind of people whose opinions I spurn. Apart from a tenor so ingratiating it makes your teeth hurt, it is stiff with illiterate irritants: “alright”, “’til” and an inability to inflect the verb ‘to lie’ which emerges in such forms as “laying down again and nuzzling her neck” [p 217, Hodder edition] and “she lay her back down once again” [p 87] and on the next page “she lay her book down” [p 88] which rather suggests that it should have been “book” the first time and then, ye gods, there’s a desultory discussion on whether “lying” or “laying” is correct [p 89]: well, in all these “lay” and “laying” are incorrect. It’s a given to expect a professional writer to write proper English and, where that is beyond the writer’s powers, an editor to make sure that such abominations do not pass the proofing stage.

No doubt this particular matter will not have troubled the makers of the movie, for which the novel has evidently been Americanised. And that degree of dramatisation is a whole other ballgame.