“White Oleander” And Other Films From Novels

Not too long ago I talked to you about a depressing but wonderful book entitled White Oleander. Like many best selling novels, this one was recently made into a movie. Today, I want to say a few things about this particular novel adaptation, but more importantly, about the whole practice of adapting novels to film, and also a bit about how one ought to judge such efforts.

First, take a moment and count up what you would take to be genuinely successful novel to movie adaptations. I bet it didn’t take long, and I bet you didn’t have to use both hands. Indeed, some of you may still be trying to count enough even for the first hand. The very idea of making a movie from what has been a successful novel is a conservative one; Hollywood hates taking real risks. American movie makers would rather do Rocky 14 or Halloween 6 than risk a good script with a good cast that has not yet been stamped with the mass marketing seal of approval.

Sometimes old novels, especially if they are about the rich, can be made into visually sumptuous film feasts in which all the marvels of expensive contemporary cinematic techniques can be used to visually stupefy the audience. I have in mind here some of the more or less successful adaptations of Henry James and Edith Wharton novels, all of which could be gathered together into a “Lives of the rich and famous” genre. And while I don’t intend simply to pan such efforts, anyone who has read, for example, the complex and intricate House of Mirth by Edith Wharton or the exquisitely detailed The Golden Bowl by Henry James will realize immediately how the movie adaptations failed in almost all ways to do justice to the novels. This was not simply a failing of the particular movie makers; such complete and phenomenologically rich novels cannot be condensed to the screen without losing most of what was excellent in the books. Some of the eight-to-ten hour public television serializing of novels has done a better job of capturing the original complexity of the books, but it is simply not possible in the ninety to one hundred twenty minutes allowed to mainstream movies.

Indeed, realizing how much novels depend on the reader being able to ‘see’ inside the heads of characters, characters who can be both actor and commentator in key scenes, and how novels can sometimes ‘play’ the same scenes several times through the prismatic viewing screens of different characters, one can see the utter audacity of trying to render such complex material in a few visual scenes. How long does it take to read a good novel? How much of what makes the novel a good one is simply extraneous to what might be called the core of the novel? My answer is, “Not much.” The goodness, the excellence, is in the detail

I used the word ‘render’ quite intentionally; think of that word in its sense of reducing to essence or boiling down, clarifying. Now, were films really able to render novels in the sense of boiling down or clarifying, reducing to their essences, that would be a profound and noble undertaking indeed. But novels, at least really good ones, are not meant to be boiled down, to be stripped to their essence. Indeed, it they are really good novels, then their goodness will dwell in their detail, in their complexity, in their life-likeness. In novels, we can sometimes see the development of a character over months, even years, occasionally even over a lifetime. I tend to think that even in the case of novels, the best ones cover relatively short periods of time with only general hints of past and future. But if this is true of novels, it seems to be to be even more true of successful films. Films that cover a day, a week, a month, a year can be much ‘fuller’ and more life-like than those that attempt to cover decades, lifetimes.

But suppose we simply admit (what seems to be true) that films cannot provide the character richness and development possible in novels, and that it is an unfair expectation that they do so. Certainly, many film buffs would insist that films must be judged on their own merits—on how well they do what they can do rather than on how they fail to do what they cannot. How, then, ought we to view and judge films that are adapted from novels?

I suppose what we ought to do first (in our attempt to be fair) is to try to ‘forget’ the novel when we go to see the movie. If we are forever comparing the film to the book, we will find the film wanting in so many ways. Similarly, I want to claim that there are films that are successful only because the film-makers depend on an audience who watches the movie simply as an extension or visual addition to a story-line they already know and love, to a book already read. In such cases, the movie does not have to tell the whole story; the audience will fill in the missed scenes, the internal dialogue, the unseen pasts and futures. (Think for a moment of the Harry Potter books and movies, or even of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings).

Better, I want to claim, to try out films on those who have not read the book. See if much of the important ‘message’ of the novel comes through; see if the characters seem full and believable to these ‘innocent’ viewers. If the film is a really good one, then it should be able to stand on its own. Perhaps it will not be as profound or as rich as the novel, but it will be complete and comprehensible as far as it goes. If films pass this test, then they are good films whether or not they live up to the novels from which they are adapted.

Even with these generous criteria, my list of successful movies adapted from novels does not increase that much, but it at least doubles, probably triples. And, getting finally to the movie “White Oleander,” I would have to say that the movie succeeds as a statement that stands alone, and even further, that it does quite a good job of capturing at least some of what was so haunting and important about the book.

I was fully prepared not to like this movie, and this was perhaps because I liked the novel so much and was so skeptical about the very possibility of rendering it in film. Michelle Pfeiffer is simply superb as the beautiful but icy and self-absorbed mother, a bit too sweet and Michelle Pfeifferish in the first few scenes, but she grows into the hard bitten and icily beautiful character described in the novel. Alison Lohman, who has to play a girl of about thirteen who develops slowly into a scarred and world-wise eighteen year old, does a very good job, especially if she is not compared to the much more complex and conflicted girl, Astrid, in the novel on whom her character is based. Before seeing the movie, I winced at the choices of actresses to play other characters (e.g., Renee Zellweger as the lonely and reclusive actress and foster mother, Claire), but in fact, they all did very well, again, especially if not compared to the naturally richer and more complex characters in the novel.

Of course, so much of the novel is left out; two of the five foster-care situations faced by the young Astrid are simply skipped over. Each omission takes away, I think, from the believability and development of her character, and also from the progressive disintegration of her relationship with her mother. This makes the ending of the movie less poignant and less fitting with the whole. And an even more serious failing is in the decision by the film-makers not to include more of the early relationship between the mother and daughter, which would in turn have provided more context for the crime at the center of the movie and a much fuller picture of the mother. This omission they try to make up for in a few flashbacks, but I know, had I not read the book, I would find the flashbacks more confusing than illuminating and the crime less believable than it is in the book.

So, am I recommending that you see the movie? Yes, and especially if seeing the movie might lead you back to the book. Perhaps that will also put you in a good position to decide on my criteria for judging novel adaptations.

White Oleander by Janet Fitch

I want to talk to you this morning about a beautiful but also very disturbing book. The title of the book is White Oleander, and its author is Janet Fitch. The book is disturbing because it is about a young girl who goes through a series of foster homes and is exposed to the horrors and dangers of the world so early; she is denied any sort of genuine childhood, denied any sort of home. But in spite of how awful her various situations are, the writing is beautiful beyond description. I know almost nothing about this writer, but I suspect that she must either be a painter herself or that she has lived around someone who painted as a way to talk back to the world. The painterly quality of the writing is at times so achingly beautiful that the reader almost forgets the bleakness of the situations being described. Indeed, some of my reader friends found the language too beautiful, insisting that the author’s absorption with word pictures, her intensely careful painting of words on paper interfered with the stark realities being described, even with the covert message of the book. Perhaps they are right in their criticisms, but for me, a hopelessly inept artist who is mesmerized by those who can capture the world in images, this is simply beautiful writing.

This is, like so many books that capture my attention, a first novel. The young Danish girl described in it is the daughter of a talented and beautiful but icy and self absorbed mother who prefers poetry and music to men and who dismisses all of her daughter’s queries about the sperm donor responsible for her birth. When she asks about her father, she is told that she has no father, that fathers are irrelevant. The reader meets this young girl, Astrid, when she is twelve years old, living with her mother, Ingrid, in southern California. The Santa Anas are blowing, furnace like, bringing in the thick smell of the poisonous oleanders. Ingrid, the mother, seems to have it right; men are worse than unnecessary; Astrid and she can do very well without them. The young girl loves to look at her white-blond and beautiful mother, to be included in her powerful aura, to hear her poetry, hear her tell of the many places in the world they have lived. But when one of the men who chases after Ingrid will not be shrugged off, continues to pursue, to demand to be noticed, Ingrid finally relents, and for a short time, Astrid has a man, a sort of father in her life, and sees her mother soften some, sees her melt, give in.

I don’t intend to tell you much about the plot in this complex and intricate novel, indeed I can’t betray the ending, for I have not yet quite finished it. But I am not giving away much in telling you that this brief period of happiness, a mom, a surrogate dad, and happy child does not last long. Just as Ingrid has always warned her, men are not to be trusted, not to be indulged, not to be counted on or lived with. The charming Barry who has melted the ice queen has no inkling of just what he has found, what he has uncovered. When he tries to leave this woman behind (as he has done with all the women he has ever known), he discovers that he has unwittingly made a lifetime commitment.

Without saying too much, let me say that Ingrid is soon in prison and Astrid is in the first of many foster placements. The series of events and placements that follow are almost incredibly awful. Indeed, if we did not know from reading the news that just such horrors actually occur, we would not find the series of events credible. I found myself supposing that this must be an autobiographical novel. Why would anyone bother to fabricate such an awful train of events? In fact, I began to think that I could not forgive the author if the book were not, for the most part, autobiographical. I could understand her having to tell her own story, but I could not understand why she would construct it simply as a way of writing a story.

With the bit of research I have done, it appears that the novel is not autobiographical, but it is equally obvious that the writer knows a lot about foster homes and about what so often happens to children once they become wards of the state. She is not telling us this story just for kicks. I have no way of knowing what instigated the author’s search into abandoned children, but it is obvious that once she began, she felt she had to tell us what she uncovered. I suspect that the life described as Astrid’s is, in fact, pieced together from the real lived-lives of several different children. But neither is this simply a fictionalized expose of what gets called children services (though it certainly is intended at least in part as a wake-up call, a call to action). The twelve year old child whom we meet in the opening pages of the novel and follow through her tortured life in junior high and then high school has much to tell us of the world. Almost as beautiful as her imprisoned mother, Astrid comes to see what a curse her beauty is in a world controlled by men. In one confrontation with a young boy in a detention center, who, like Astrid, cannot help but express his relationship with the world in the form of visual art, the boy tries to tell her how beautiful she is. When she explains that what he sees as her beauty hurts her more than it helps her, he at first refuses to understand. Thinking he has been cursed always with ugliness (though really it is only the bad skin of adolescence), he continues to insist that Astrid secretly must welcome her beauty. Let me have Astrid speak for herself.

“It doesn’t mean anything. Only to other people.”

“You say that like it’s nothing.”

“It is.” What was beauty unless you intended to use it, like a hammer, or a key? It was just something for other people to use and admire, or envy, or despise. To nail their dreams onto like a picture hanger on a blank wall. And so many girls saying, use me, dream me.

“You’ve never been ugly.” replies the boy, and talks of how hurtful it is to be rejected, to never be touched or allowed to touch. As if to make his point, he asks Astrid if she would allow him to touch. Her reply:

“I don’t let anyone touch me.”

“Why not?”

Why not? Because I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whisky ... men who made you love them and then changed their minds. Forests of boys, their ragged shrubs full of eyes following you, grabbing your breasts, waving their money, eyes already knocking you down, taking what they felt was theirs.

I wouldn’t want potential readers to think that this book is unremittingly sad or bitter. In fact, the beauty of the description is almost overwhelming, and there are moments of ease, even of happiness for this girl. There are a few women who actually see her, who care about her rather than simply using her for their own gains. And somehow even the sad and awful parts seem to instruct.

All in all, this is a good book, maybe even a great one. It is neither short nor easy to read. Read it when you are strong and when you have time.