Adaptation May Be Hard, but Little Goes a Long Way

"If you liked the book, you'll love the movie"-or so the film studios would have you believe. From the box office hits (The Da Vinci Code, The Devil Wears Prada) to the buzzed-about smaller films (Thank You for Smoking, Marie Antoinette), many of the year's major movies have been based on literature. Despite the built-in audience of bookworms, it's often difficult to adapt a book's tone to the screen, and nothing will sink a movie faster than the ire of betrayed book lovers (see All the King's Men). When adaptations work, though, they give us a richer perspective on the works they are based on, while creating a cinematic experience that stands on its own merits. This season, Infamous, Running With Scissors, and Little Children, among other films, are hoping to do justice to their source material, as well as impress critics and Oscar voters with their literary pedigree.

The film Infamous, based on George Plimpton's biography Truman Capote, uses many different sources to tell its story, much like the oral history technique that Plimpton uses in his book. The film never presents one objective description of the man, as did last year's Capote, adapted from a historical biography, to its benefit. Infamous writer and director Douglas McGrath adapts Plimpton's original interviews to film ineffectively, interspersing a series of talking-head sessions throughout the film. These extended monologues seem stagy. The reliance on merely telling us aspects of Truman Capote's story leaves the character's inner life an unsatisfying enigma, a result that Plimpton couldn't have intended with his approach.

Plimpton, over the course of his book, conveys the divergent events in Capote's life. However, the film's tone is rushed and deeply inconsistent, hinging on frequent and sudden juxtaposition between Capote as investigator of violent crime and foppish town gossip. No doubt it was hard for filmmakers to adapt a story told from so many perspectives, but the film does not succeed in trying to convey such alternately grim and giddy events.

Like Plimpton's biography, Augusten Burroughs's memoir Running With Scissors contains both extremely light and dark tones, which writer and director Ryan Murphy struggles to bring to the screen coherently. The book deals with Burroughs's childhood, with characters including the child's psychotic mother and her deeply eccentric therapist.

On the page, one finds many of the events in the book charming, and a number of the film's scenes carry with them Burroughs's wit. However, the film forces a near-manic pace, splitting the dark humor of Burroughs's memoir into two tones-darkness and humor. Both work as best as they can, but until the witty and deeply sad ending, the two tones are never simultaneously present, leading to a strangely divided moviegoing experience.

This divide is epitomized by the emphasis on the character of Burroughs's mother Deirdre-a notable change from Burroughs's book. While the book depicts her receding into the background as Augusten matures, the film draws Augusten's storyline more sketchily. Deirdre takes center stage, and her decline overshadows the sweet sadness of Augusten's childhood. Thankfully, she's an engrossing character-both humorous and frightening-but the viewer familiar with the book will likely be anxious to return to the protagonist's own story, which is too often relegated to the background. The film does not suit the tone of a book told by Burroughs that is primarily about his childhood, not his mother's collapse.

One recent film adaptation that perfectly matched the tone of its source material was Little Children. The script (cowritten by the novel's author, Tom Perrotta, and the film's director, Todd Field) achieves the ironic detachment of the novel in part by using nature-documentary-style narration. The movie is just as cool and unsentimental as the novel in showing the consequences of obsession, romantic and otherwise, and the deadening impact of suburban life. We immediately understand characters through marvelously incisive scenes-for instance, disaffected housewife Sarah sitting alone on a park bench while the other mothers gossip together.

Not every scene in Little Children is effective-a book-club debate over the novel Madame Bovary falls as flat on-screen as it did on the page. However, Little Children presents a series of compelling set pieces and motifs-for instance, the constant sound of train whistles in the distance-that build on one another to create a claustrophobic sense of foreboding. As a novel, Little Children was largely entertainment about suburban parents having an affair, and the film presents that narrative but does more, asking us to examine the pain we cause when we fail to understand one another.

Too few adaptations convey the ever-shifting tones and shades of meaning of the written word as Little Children does. Infamous and Running With Scissors seem ham-handed in their attempts to resolve ambiguities with contradictory tones. But Little Children's success as a film, like any good adaptation, comes not from trying to squeeze out the viewer's laughs and tears inorganically. Instead, it is a result of expanding the source's tone from a sheaf of pages onto the screen, creating a film for those seeking a new perspective on the book or those simply seeking a great-and literary-film experience.