For the week of August 8th, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing the Hulu miniseries 11.22.63 to Blu-ray. Author Stephen King's original novel is, bar none, the best full-length text he's written in twenty years (runners-up: the short-but-sweet Dark Tower fable The Wind Through The Keyhole and the underrated Lisey's Story), so it was only logical that a) someone would want to make a movie version even though b) fans would dread all the ways Hollywood might bungle it. A big part of what makes the book so good is also what makes it problematic to adapt. Yes, King has a sexy hook - through a series of miraculous contrivances, schoolteacher Jake Epping (played in the miniseries by James Franco) travels back to the 1960s in order to stop John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas - but the thrills play second-fiddle to King's stunning recreation of late-1950s/early 1960s America. Our hero soaks in what the past has to offer, yet it's this very leisure time that a conventional film adaptation would have to cut for pacing (gotta love Jonathan Demme, who was initially contracted to direct 11.22.63, but even he wouldn't have been able to pack the spirit of the text into a two or three-hour movie). Enter J.J. Abrams and Friday Night Lights writer Bridget Carpenter, who have managed the near impossible. In allowing for an eight-hour miniseries, they're able to preserve what makes 11.22.63 so special. It's not that they've been indulgent in planning out the series - far from it. Carpenter has cut material throughout, beginning Jake's time-travels in 1960 rather than in 1958 and losing his long stay in Florida, and she's made reasonable concessions to enhance the pure-thriller aspect of the text. King's masterstroke was imagining a form of time-travel where the past violently resists any and all major changes, and Carpenter builds on that conceit, primarily through her expansion of George MacKay's Bill Turcotte from minor side-character to Jake's sidekick, whose fundamental instability proves hazardous to the mission. However, Carpenter still lingers on Jake marveling at the 1960s, and as such, we become far more invested in the more conventional genre stuff. David Cronenberg's great production designer Carol Spier handles the location details, and she's turned Ontario (with some brief location footage in Dallas) into the dream version of the past, a candy-colored slice of Americana that we, like Jake, can't help but get lost in.
It helps, too, that Franco is so good. As committed as he is in his weird art projects/Seth Rogen-buddy films, Franco can seem checked out when he's saddled with conventional leading-man duties (see: Annapolis, The Great Raid, Tristan and Isolde, Flyboys, Eat Pray Love, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and Oz the Great and Powerful, for a brief selection. There are many more examples), but he's uncommonly invested here, providing a perfect viewer surrogate once the complications start piling up, none of which is more affecting than his relationship with Sarah Gadon's Sadie Dunhill. Gadon has a thankless job - she has to play the Most Wonderful Girl In The World - but she's so luminous and tough and engaging that she convinces you she's got a life outside of the plot AND that she's as great as Jake thinks she is. She also draws a tenderness out of Franco that I've never seen him use before, and that's including his sensitive turns in Milk or 127 Hours. Gadon is the heart of 11.22.63, and she alone helps turn this miniseries into a curious, lovely fusion of something like The Parallax View and Back to the Future. That's not to say that 11.22.63 is a perfect adaptation. In streamlining the text for even eight hours, Carpenter and Co. compromised some important material. Jake's run-in with the psychopathic Frank Dunning (a chilling Josh Duhamel, of all people) loses the disturbing capper it had in the novel, and the writers have reduced all the business with Kevin J. O'Connor's "Yellow Card Man" so much that it feels even less essential than in the novel (they probably should have cut this material completely). Plus, they still haven't cracked the big conclusion, which was the weakest part of King's source material. Without going too far into spoilers, I'll say that King stumbled in the last act by jarringly shifting realities at a certain point, and this TV 11.22.63 wobbles even further by removing some necessary connective tissue (I'm guessing for budgetary purposes. Those who have read the book will be able to guess what I'm talking about). That said, both novel and show stick the landing where it counts, offering a last scene that's both melancholy and beautiful. On the page, it was one of King's big high-water marks, and the series perfectly replicates that feeling on screen. Very few Stephen King adaptations capture what's so special about his finest works, but even with its faults and all, 11.22.63 is one of the best.
Also on the adaptation front from Warner is the classic 1958 drama Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. In many ways, the film exists as yet another in a wide stable of 1950s melodramas about Frustrated Suburbanites, evincing much of the same narrative DNA you might find in Picnic or Violent Saturday or Peyton Place or All That Heaven Allows (and there are many, many more); we have the fractious relationship between beautiful young Maggie (Elizabeth Taylor) and her emotionally and physically distant husband Brick (Paul Newman), a relationship unfolding against the equally tumultuous backdrop of Brick's family, which is tearing itself apart over the secret revelation that Brick's domineering father (Burl Ives) has terminal cancer. But unlike other melodramas of its ilk, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has endured. Certainly, writer-director Richard Brooks deserves a share of the credit for his yeoman's work. An underrated auteur who specialized in literate, adult dramas during the 1950s and 1960s (best in show: his ensemble Western The Professionals and his chilling adaptation of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood), Brooks has a nuanced attention for character and behavior that helps him get great work from Taylor (who conveys both beauty and inner strength under Brooks), Newman (in one of his best early turns), and especially Ives, whom Brooks won't let rely on his hammiest tics and who delivers an achingly vulnerable performance as a result. But he's working from good stock: the film takes inspiration from Tennessee Williams' play of the same name, and no one knew how to mine genuine pathos from melodramatic pulp better than Williams. Something like A Streetcar Named Desire could devolve into a hodge-podge of problematic clichés, but Williams elevates it into high art. So it goes with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - Williams treats the setup for an extended metaphor about the lies we need (and think we need) to function as normal human beings. Nowhere is this theme more prevalent than in the most controversial element of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof's play-to-film transition. On stage, Brick's ennui stems directly from his buried sexuality: Brick is a closeted homosexual, and when his best male friend - and object of his attention - dies, Brick tailspins into emotional upheaval. But Brooks was making an adaptation within the conventional Hollywood system, so his version couldn't be as specific about Brick's desires as Williams could be. Yet Brooks achieves a real strength nonetheless. He makes this text subtext. Even though no one comes right out and states the source of Brick's concerns, he clearly has directed Newman to layer in that additional element. As such, we feel this inner struggle, right up until an ending that applies a too-Hollywood sheen to the deeper psychological examination. It's a stumble, but a small one, and one that barely compromises what Brooks has achieved.
Michael Reuben writes that "the marital conflict between Maggie and Brick is central, but it has been cleaned up and simplified for the screen. In the film, the crux of their dispute is Brick's belief that Maggie slept with his best friend and football colleague, Skipper, who then killed himself out of guilt. Eventually Maggie reveals that nothing happened between her and Skipper, which allows the pair a tentative reconciliation at the film's conclusion. In Williams' play, Brick's torment is far darker: a mixture of grief over the loss of his friend and sexual confusion that may or may not point to repressed homosexuality - an ambiguity that Williams stressed was deliberate. More insidious was Maggie's suggestion of a sexual element to her husband's relationship with his friend, which prompted Skipper to sleep with her to prove otherwise - and in Williams' version, the infidelity actually happened, after which Skipper drank himself to death, as Brick is now doing. Williams' play allowed no reconciliation for the tortured couple, only a form of benevolent blackmail in which Maggie forces Brick to impregnate her by withholding alcohol until he performs. All the while, she maintains that she is acting from love, which Brick steadfastly denies in the exact same words with which Big Daddy condemns his own devoted wife, Big Mama (Judith Anderson). Both the play and the film feature a shattering confrontation between Brick and his father, who are far more alike than either of them wants to admit. As Big Daddy relentlessly presses his son to take responsibility for his life, Brick retaliates by cruelly informing Big Daddy that he's dying. In the playwright's original version, Big Daddy storms out of the room after learning his true prognosis and never returns. Concerned for the play's commercial success, Williams was persuaded to bring Big Daddy back to the stage to create a tentative truce between father and son, but they exchange only a few additional remarks. The film not only prolongs the argument, but also extends it into areas Williams never intended, as Brick angrily accuses his father of never having loved him and Big Daddy is forced to acknowledge the consequences of the cruelty with which he has presided over his family all these years. What began as an epic confrontation ends in pop psychology and forced sentiment, as father and son achieve an awkward reconciliation that nudges Brick back into Maggie's arms. In the film's final frames, Newman's Brick glimpses the possibility of a brighter future, and he's no longer the permanently crippled spirit that Williams conceived."
Less successful a film adaptation is Lionsgate Home Entertainment's release of A Hologram for the King. In theory, this project couldn't have seemed more exciting - director Tom Tykwer, of Run Lola Run and Perfume fame, adapting Dave Eggers' wonderful novel and reuniting with his Cloud Atlas star Tom Hanks in the process. You got to figure, good people tackling good material can't miss, right? However, after seeing this film version, I'm reminded that it's far easier to make a good movie from a bad book than from a good one. You can't shoot a sentence, and Eggers is such a beautiful craftsman on the page; he elevates an absurdist study of modernity and masculinity - after suffering many one indignities, salesman Alan Clay (Hanks, of course) gets a shot at redemption when he's tasked with selling a questionable piece of technology (the hologram of the title) to the king of Saudi Arabia - through his descriptions of the Middle East and of Clay's fracturing psyche. It's a subjective book that demands total immersion with the protagonist, and Eggers' words reinforce that bond. As such, Tykwer is already operating at a disadvantage, although he keeps things humming along nicely for about forty minutes or so. Tykwer delights in the wanderlust/dislocation we feel when encountering new worlds, and he gets a lot of mileage watching Hanks's bewildered Everyman wander through the King's empty, massive city of the future (aptly called the "Metropolis of Economy and Trade"). Huge skyscrapers tower over nothing, save the occasional aide tasked with sweeping sand, and this visual metaphor does a better job of conveying Clay's suspicion that his whole existence is little more than a puffed-up illusion - he does, after all, want to sell something that technically doesn't exist (Tykwer's visual invention, in fact, is far more effective than having Hanks sing Talking Heads's "Once in a Lifetime" in the opening scene). And Hanks is a perfect foil for this kind of material. He might hold the Emeritus Title for America's Sweetheart (along with Julia Roberts), but as far back as Joe Versus the Volcano, he's been willing to let his easy-going charm crumble in the face of a harsh and uncaring machine. So it comes as a bit of a letdown when A Hologram for the King downshifts from surrealist anti-comedy to another "Middle-aged white dude finds his groove in a foreign land" dramedy. Hanks begins a relationship with a local woman (the lovely Sarita Choudary), and as well played as this material is - Hanks and Choudary have nice chemistry together - this material is so familiar. Granted, it existed, to a degree, in Eggers' original text, but he always kept the focus on Clay's destabilization and malaise. You can sense Tykwer giving up, although I have read rumors that the finished film suffered many cuts in the editing process. That explanation makes sense (at over 300 hundred pages long, the book is dense with incident while the film is just over ninety minutes long. You do the math), but it still doesn't keep the film version from being any less of a letdown.