A Night at the Movies

I love movies. I collect DVDs and have a great many quotes and references from my favorite films always at the ready. I use movies in my teaching, and think of them in much the same way that I think about texts.

Last night, my husband and I took Bowyer out to the movies to see The Prestige. Both Bowyer and I LOVE the Apple movie trailer site, and we'd both seen the previews for this film long before it came out. Bowyer knew that the film was based on a book, so he went to Amazon and secured copies of the novel for both of us. We read the book pretty much simultaneously - which, in itself, was fun; Bowyer is an avid reader and we had some really interesting and lively discussions about our impressions of the text - and we both came to the conclusion that it would make a very fine film.

We bought our tickets, secured popcorn and soda and found some seats. We sat through what seemed like an inordinate number of previews, some of which - this one and this one in particular - looked really good. The lights went down and the film began.

It was almost NOTHING like the book. In the first three minutes, the film took a 180° turn and we were led through a story with familiar characters doing unexpected things.

We loved it.

One of the pitfalls of interpreting texts into film is that there is so much in the written version of a work that just doesn't translate adequately onto the screen. We aren't privy to a character's inner thoughts (without the use of campy voice-overs) and much of the richness of description and nuance is lost when watching a film rather than reading a text. Does that mean that I think books are always better? That answer is "most certainly NOT." Each medium has its advantages and shortcomings, and I'm just as often absolutely delighted at the richness and subtlety of film as I am a turn of phrase or a perfectly wrought description in a novel.

Knowing the intricacies of negotiating between written word and celluloid image, I think, the director of The Prestige took the essence of the Priest story, shifted here, manipulated there, altered a little around the edges, and came out with a topnotch film that did a great honor to the text from which it was inspired. The themes were precisely the same in the film as in the book. The intensity of the characters was skillfully and believably portrayed. It didn't matter to Bowyer and me that there was a trial in the film that never happened in the book, or that the narrating characters in the novel were entirely absent from the film: the story was beautifully interpreted, and was well worth the cost of the tickets.

My one complaint (if you could call it that)? The end of the novel was deliciously creepy. The narrating characters - and we readers alongside - came to realize something that had been hinted at but never revealed, and I was really grateful that my husband was sitting next to me as I made my way through the last 20 or so pages. That same pit-of-the-stomach eerie dread wasn't well conveyed in the film, though there was an excellent treatment of irony for one of the main characters to come to grips with before he died.

Perhaps my (minor) disappointment was because I knew the secret beforehand and, as one of the characters explains in the film, "once they know your secret, you're nothing to them," but I didn't think that end of the film had as much impact for me as the end of the novel. Still, it was a remarkably well worked movie and I'm glad I saw it.