Films like this made me wish I read more books in my
off-time. Not that I’m ashamed of my literary diet mainly consisting of comic
books and articles written by my contemporaries, but in terms of literary
adaptations, part of me thinks that I should incorporate reading the source
material into my pre-viewing background routine. Admittedly, the reason why I
don’t as a general rule is so I can more easily let a given film stand on its
own merits, since the source material tends to be far superior than any
adaptation of the work anyway. And yes, I’ve done the exact opposite for
remakes and the like, but different medium, different rules, far as I’m
concerned.
At any rate, in the case of this film, I started wondering
about this because I genuinely don’t know how much of this film’s faults are to
do with the adaptation or to do with the original book.
I can certainly guess at what went wrong in the adaptation
though, as the acting is so inconsistent as to induce laughter on more than one
occasion. Oakes Fegley and Ansel Elgort as the child and adult versions of the
main character respectively, the traumatised art seller Theo, is good enough to
work as the film’s dramatic nucleus, but everyone else around him… what the
fuck accent is Finn Wolfhard sporting as the Ukrainian Boris? It sounds like
something he picked up from Danny Sexbang, it’s that tuned towards caricature.
The only thing that comes close to that level of disconnect is Luke Wilson as
Theo’s father, who surprisingly turns up the volume and energy in his later
scenes, which only go to show that there’s likely a reason he’s better known
for beige monotone in most of his other films.
Not that their dialogue helps them in any scene, and here’s
why my bigger questions about adaptation kick in. Knowing Peter Straughan’s
previous writing credits include the incredibly jumbled The Snowman, I almost
want to ask if that film’s woes were genuinely a result of the halted
production time because the same problems crop up here. Aside from being very
disjointed from scene-to-scene, trying for a tonal balancing act that never
manages to even out, the writing is embarrassingly overwrought. Not to mention
overwritten; if you’re going to have conversations where people just reiterate
what the other person said, in a movie that’s nearly two-and-a-half-hours long,
you need a rewrite. Badly.
That’s definitely part of the problem here as, while the
film definitely shows some real talent in its visuals and some thematic texture
in its storytelling, the plodding length really drains the energy out of most
of it. I get that the source material is almost 800 pages long, so truncating
the story for a shorter runtime potentially could have turned out worse, but
the end result doesn’t look like focusing on the important points. It
definitely hits those points, particularly its musings on trauma, art and the
impermanence of life, but with how many detours are taken here, it really
needed to latch onto the biggest points and flesh them out rather than try and
include everything. It would certainly help the film’s tone from veering
into crime caper, domestic thriller and psychological drama seemingly at
random.
Part of me wants to give this film a pass, as its sentiments
about how the titular painting reflects Theo’s traumatic loss of his mother
actually ring true and show that there’s definitely a reason why this book was
adapted at all. But that would only work if those moments, which show up right
at the end, were worth the preceding two hours in their entirety to get to.
Quite frankly, I may appreciate it but something in my gut tells me that that
thematic touch is a carry-over from the book, not a moment of Straughan and
director John Crowley hitting the emotional paydirt they were aiming for.
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