Double Feature: Adaptations

I’m no great fan of voice-over narration, but how else to adapt a novel for the screen if its greatest strengths are ruminative? If you’re Jason Reitman, you add a new character, or two, and have the protagonist hector them with his formerly-interior monologues. In Thank You for Smoking, he conjured up a child to travel with the hero, so the hero could explain the job of a lobbyist to (by extension) us dumb hick moviegoers, and he conjures up another youth to tag after George Clooney in Up in the Air.
In the novel, our hero is in deep denial, and fashions a weirdly-enticing alternate reality out of his business-travel existence as he heads for a breakdown; in the film, Clooney plays a cool guy whose priorities are out of whack. His job is firing people, and the painful scenes of people being terminated from their jobs arrive with the regularity of the murders in a slasher flick, but to what end? So that Clooney and his apprentice can learn some small thing about themselves, yawn. If you don’t want the camera to follow J.K. Simmons when he leaves that office, and stick with him for at least five minutes, if not the remainder of the movie, I don’t know what to tell you. As it stands, Reitman has no idea how to end the movie. I wonder if he knows why he made it.



Watching Edmond, on the other hand, it’s easy to feel that everyone involved knew exactly what they were doing, why they were doing it, and why they wanted to. Directed by Stuart Gordon (maker of some of the most entertaining horror films of the past thirty years, and of the recent Zero-Sum World favorite, Stuck) from a script by David Mamet (adapting his own play) and featuring Mamet players Bill Macy, Rebecca Pidgeon, and Joe Mantegna, Edmond is simply the best Mamet on film thus far. More importantly, for readers of this blog, it is a very pure example of the One-Way Ticket to Hell story, bracingly fearless, with as devastating an ending as any film I can remember recommending wholeheartedly to my loved ones! Seek it out! (Currently offered as a Free Movie on Comcast OnDemand in the Detroit area.)