Read between the frames
Why CanLit seldom goes to Hollywood
BY Chris Eng
Photography courtesy Capri Releasing Inc.
So, as tradition has it, summer rolls around and you get out your most comfortable tracksuit, limber up and prepare for an uninterrupted season of blockbuster movie watching. Equipped with a jumbo bucket of malted milk balls and a copy of the latest Cahiers du cinéma, you make a list of the films you’re going to see, starting with those perennial favourites: Canadian bestseller adaptations.
“One,” you count off in your head, Away From Her, based on the Alice Munro novella. Two...” And that’s about as far as you get, forcing you to sink back dejectedly into your couch and wonder what Spider-Man 3 might have been like if it had been based on an Ann-Marie MacDonald book. Goodnight Mary Jane (Good Morning Gwen Stacy)? The Way the Green Goblin Flies?
The bestselling novel has always had a strong relationship with the cinema, whether you’re talking about timeless classics like The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind and D.W. Griffith’s Klan-loving The Birth of a Nation or modern fare such as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. But Canada’s bestselling novels have always engaged in an uneasy pas de deux with Hollywood, firstly because we don’t have many Dan Browns of our own, and second because of the conflicted relationship we have with American culture.
We understand how movies like Never Cry Wolf get made, because it’s about one man, some wolves and the tundra, but A Complicated Kindness is a serious novel about the human condition and those are things we try to keep to ourselves (or, in this case, give to the Brits) because exposure to the United States might sully and debase them. We have a knee-jerk paranoia that if we let the Southerners get their hands on our literature, they’ll cast Rob Schneider and Kelly Clarkson in starring roles and let Michael Bay direct—which, admittedly, would be the cinematic equivalent of doing an extended brake stand all over our collective soul. Then again, when they do notice and adapt our “serious works” like, say, The English Patient, we sit up and have a Sally Field moment: “You like us! Right now, you like us!”
How do we as Canadians feel about Field of Dreams? We still haven’t figured it out. Canadian book: pride! American blockbuster: shame! W.P. Kinsella: pride! Kevin Costner: shame!
Kinsella’s work was also adapted for Bruce McDonald’s Dance Me Outside, but that’s something we feel okay about because it was a Canadian production. So was Away From Her, for that matter. The Claude Jutra adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing was ours (yay!), but The Handmaid’s Tale was out of Hollywood (boo!). We probably wouldn’t have liked The Handmaid’s Tale even if it was a good movie, because it’s speculative fiction and genre fiction isn’t serious (which is the reason why, although we have accepted William Gibson as one of our own, we will never take any filmic adaptations of his works seriously and why we will pooh-pooh Atwood’s Oryx and Crake should it ever have the gauche sense to appear on the silver screen).
So what does all of this say about us as a people? Evidently, that we are torn. Our national identity as exemplified in our novels is something we’re fiercely protective of, as are our dreams and persona and how they’re presented for the world to see. We don’t mind (or maybe mind less) if one of our non-serious works is transformed into a large-scale American production, but for everything else, we’d like to do it ourselves. Failing that, we’ll go see foreign adaptations anyway, badmouthing them if they’re awful and nodding sagely if they’re good. And perhaps most importantly, it says we’re on pins and needles waiting for the film version of Ondaatje’s Divisadero ... as long as one of our own—I think Norman Jewison might be available— directs it.
