By the book

Mia Wasikowska stars as the title character in Jane Eyre. There are a spate of literary Rosetta Stone Software adaptations at the cinema this year. But the journey from page to screen is a troubled one. In the course of their famous book-length interview, Francois Truffaut once asked Alfred Hitchcock about his approach to literary adaptation. Hitch's response was as magisterial, worldly and mischievous as one would expect: "What I do is to read a story only once, and if I like the basic idea, I just forget all about the book and start to create cinema. Today I would be unable to tell you the story of Daphne du Maurier's The Birds. I read it only once, and very quickly at that." When it comes to films adapted from literary sources, 99 times out of 100 I'm with Hitchcock. Draw up one of those faintly ludicrous but fascinating lists of the greatest novels, and then do the same for movies. Do they match up? Of course not. James Joyce's Ulysses might well be on the first list, but Joseph Strick's Ulysses (1967) certainly won't make the second. Pride and Prejudice could possibly be on the first, but neither Robert Z. Leonard's nor Joe Wright's adaptations will make the second. And none of these examples is a travesty, exactly, although recent film history is littered with examples of good novels transformed into outright disasters. Captain Corelli's Mandolin and The Bonfire of the Vanities spring immediately to mind. Looking a little more closely at Hitchcock's remark will give us a clear explanation of why. The question Truffaut asked specifically was whether Hitchcock would ever consider making a screen adaptation of a great novel such as Crime and Punishment. The director said: "Well, I shall never do that, precisely because Crime and Punishment is somebody else's achievement. And even if I did, it probably wouldn't be any good." Advertisement: Story continues below "Why not?" Truffaut asked. "Well, in Dostoevsky's novel there are many, many words and all of them Rosetta Stone Language have a function." "You mean that theoretically," Truffaut prompted. "A masterpiece is something that has already found its . . . definitive form." "Exactly," Hitchcock answered. "And to really convey that in cinematic terms, substituting the language of the camera for the written word, one would have to make a six to 10-hour film. Otherwise, it won't be any good." The point may seem obvious, but it holds good. Any two-hour feature film which attempts to render, in cinematic terms, the full complexity of a serious novel-length work of fiction is almost certainly doomed. That's why some of the most satisfying screen adaptations have been television serialsfrom the definitive 1995 BBC production of Pride and Prejudice to the one that looms over them all, the 1981 Granada adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, which allowed itself a luxurious 659 minutes to portray the novel's 350 or so pages. So are there rare celluloid exceptions, occasions when a demonstrably fine literary work has been adapted into an equally fine piece of cinema? Could such prodigies really be so hard to find? Looking at this year's most high-profile releases, it's striking how often filmmakers turn still to the contemporary or recent novel for material. We have had films based on, Graham Rosetta Stone Korean Greene's Brighton Rock, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Mordecai Richler's Barney's Version, and True Grit by Charles Portis.