The temptations and pitfalls of adapting your own novel for the screen

By N.E.G.

HOLLYWOOD has been adapting great books into films for over a century, and for just as long, authors have disapproved. Stephen King loathed Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” (preferring the inferior 1997 television mini-series that hewed more closely to his book), while Truman Capote dismissed the film “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” based on the casting alone--he preferred Marilyn Monroe to Audrey Hepburn. This kind of thing is understandable, given the radical revisions that must often be made to get pages onto the screen.

As a solution, some authors have taken to adapting their own work. Margaret Atwood co-wrote every episode of this year’s Emmy-award winning series of “The Handmaid’s Tale”. And now Ian McEwan is credited as the sole screenwriter on two adaptations of his recent works: “On Chesil Beach” and “The Children Act”.

“On Chesil Beach” (pictured above) is, on the surface, the more difficult material. The events take place over the course of a single hour; they are necessarily filled out by long passages of introspection and recollection. The focus is the wedding night of Edward (Billy Howle) and Florence (Saoirse Ronan) in 1962, and the couple are a picture of repressed British sexuality. Honeymooning by the sea, they take their first meal as husband and wife in their room—enduring the snickering of the bellhops, who know what their night has in store—and awkwardly await the consummation of their marriage.

It is clear from the outset that Edward and Florence are not a perfect fit. Florence is refined and beautiful. Her strawberry blonde hair, set against the aqua blue of her dress and her warm blue eyes, signify a passion breaking through an icy exterior. Edward has an attractive rumpledness, but is a bit frog-faced, with a too-wide smile and eyes that widen in moments of insecurity. She comes from the aristocracy, while Edward is strictly working-class. She is a classical violinist; he loves Chuck Berry. The one thing they have in common is that neither of them is quite prepared for their wedding night duties.

The viewer learns these details through flashbacks, which are present in the book, although not in such volume. Mr McEwan’s script goes back in time every few minutes to show the differences between them--including Edward’s mentally ill mother and Florence’s overbearing father--and a hint of abuse factors into the proceedings. Still, while effective, these cut-aways have a cumulatively comic effect; like our young protagonists, the audience becomes quite eager for them to just get on with it. Each new flashback feels a bit like a game Mr McEwan is playing to hold off the climax as long as possible.

While these flashbacks eventually lose their dramatic power, the film should be commended for the consistency of its approach. Mr McEwan has made a strong choice about how to dramatise this introspective book, and he sticks to it. “On Chesil Beach” mostly achieves its goal: to paint a comprehensive portrait of a single moment and how painfully it can be misinterpreted. It is a successful translation of the book’s essence, and most of its charms, as well.

While “On Chesil Beach” deviated from the source material in effective ways, Mr McEwan seemed reluctant to do the same with “The Children Act”. Here, the internal narrative is simply layered onto a new medium. It doesn’t work (although Emma Thompson’s performance makes it watchable). Fiona Maye (Ms Thompson) is a well-respected judge, arrives at home to her husband Jack (Stanley Tucci) telling her that he would like to have an affair, and that Fiona, if she cares about him, will tolerate it. This leads to the film’s single flashback: as she lays awake at night, her imagination reaches back to happier times and to a moment of pure joy when he surprised her with a new piano. Unlike in “On Chesil Beach”, the flashback here adds little to illuminate their predicament: the viewer is still left guessing as to how she ended up married to an American professor, or what their love was like at its peak.

The marriage crisis exacerbates another one, this time in Fiona’s working life. She specialises in extraordinarily hard cases involving children, often with a religious element. Her newest case is an urgent one: Adam, a 17-year-old Jehovah’s Witness with leukaemia, is refusing a blood transfusion that could save his life. Fiona must decide his corporeal and perhaps spiritual fate. She has been able to dispassionately dispatch such cases in the past, but since her husband’s disruption of their marriage, her confidence is faltering.

Her interest in the boy then, so steadfast in his own faith, is both professional and personal. Fiona takes the unusual step of visiting him in the hospital, and under Richard Eyre’s thoughtful direction, the camera offers extreme close-ups of both characters, allowing the audience to search their eyes for meaning. Fiona is looking for cracks in Adam’s guarded wall of faith. The viewer is looking for the real motive behind hers.

Unfortunately, it never quite appears. Her judicial ruling comes suddenly, ending its fascinating inquiry into the nature of faith and connection before it has even begun. Adam lives but becomes disillusioned with his faith and begins stalking Fiona, trading one obsession for another. Mr Eyre seems to be looking for some of the same notes that worked so well for him in “Notes of a Scandal” (2006), but this is not a lurid tale, and efforts to make it one—with wistful glances and tense, longing strings on the soundtrack—seem out of place. For this conflict to have dramatic heft, the viewer needs to understand Fiona better.

Perhaps a screenwriter with more distance from the original material would have been willing to radically reshape the novel, offering more backstory or drawing her decision out for dramatic impact to make the story less reliant on her inner life. “On Chesil Beach” did not call for such revisions, but “The Children Act” does. It shows that every adaptation is a unique case, even two self-adapted novels from the same hand. Some cannot simply be transposed onto the screen. Most of all, however, it shows that the writer who knows the material best is not always the one best placed to make the hard choices that can turn a great novel into a great film.