Akiva Goldsman has done a brutal OmniCorp number on Winter’s Tale in what has now become A NEW YORK WINTER’S TALE for the UK, who are apparently at risk of confusing Mark Helprin’s fiercely-loved 1983 fantasy doorstop with more locally famous homonyms. It’s hard to think of an adaptation that has wrought quite such monstrously Procrustean mutilations on its source. Almost all the limbs and vital organs have been slashed away and replaced by Hollywood clockwork, leaving only the odd face, name, and extremity to gaze out at us from inside a mechanical body which reduces a living organic creation to a clumping thing of clonks and crashes. Like Alex Murphy’s hand, a solitary dialogue scene has randomly survived (the first interview between Colin Farrell’s heart-burglar Peter and William Hurt’s newsprint patriarch), along with a dreadfully distorted version of the romance of Peter Lake and Beverly Penn with a hilariously awkward new ending, and a drastically shrunken finale which entirely inverts the outcome of Peter’s final confrontation with Pearly Soames. None of these characters is easily playable, though the very able cast do all they can with what little Goldsman’s script has left them to play, which in the case of Jennifer Connelly’s Virginia Gamely is nothing at all. Most of the supports seem to be favours called in from Goldsman’s past writing gigs (two from A Beautiful Mind, one from Lost in Space, and that chap from I, Robot and I Am Legend in a new role so gloriously wrong in conception and execution that it’s almost worth seeing the film to have been there).
It would be easy to say that a Winter’s Tale from the writer of Batman and Robin was always going to be a match as blessed as Joel Schumacher’s Lanark or Michael Bay’s Little, Big, but I’m actually not sure Goldsman is principally to blame. It’s all too evident that this film has had to be accountable to a system which is populated by people who are congenitally incapable of reading, let alone seeing the point of, 700 pages of überliterary magic realism. The novel is unfilmable not because it’s long, literary, prodigal with wonders, and overstays its welcome by a third or so, but because it can’t be experienced at second-hand. How would you even pitch it? “A thief on the run from his former boss has a coup de foudre with a dying heiress and falls through a timewarp with a magic horse to emerge eighty years later, work a few miracles, and die when a bridge to heaven fails and the city burns and is reborn.” That’s not really a story in the simple sense that Hollywood understands, nor is it really what most of the book is or is about, which is rather a century-spanning hyperDickensian fantasy of an impossible New York populated by generations of impossible characters in “the season in which time was superconductive”. But the pitch is all the executives hear, and so we strangely find ourselves in a film where characters bearing names from the novel are caught up in a cheesy by-numbers plot about demons in the service of Lucifer trying to prevent a pair of lovers from cashing in a miracle, which ends with the character who doesn’t die in the book getting killed by the one who does. “I may be just a mechanic,” says our hero, “but what are we if not machines?” Alex Murphy would have his own answer to that one.
Pretty much the same plot reappears from another screenwriter-turned-director stuffing a classic text up the crack of a Valentine’s turkey in Stuart Beattie’s I, FRANKENSTEIN, which goes one further than Winter’s Tale in symbolically setting fire to the original novel – or at least the parts of it constituting Victor Frankenstein’s journal – on screen. The credits offer “Special thanks to Mary Shelley”, who would certainly feel thanked in a very special way by this new pandemonium from the mind of Underworld confabulator Kevin Grevioux. The film opens promisingly enough in the Arctic darkness and distance of the novel’s last page, with the monster left with his maker’s corpse and literary MacGuffin (“Victor’s journal is written proof that God is no longer the sole creator of man”), but then drawn into a bizarre gothic war between demons and gargoyles with God-playing scientists in revolt against a scientist-playing God, casually skipping a couple of centuries before the main event as Miranda Otto’s gargoyle queen takes on Bill Nighy’s galvanic army with the monster and his blonde labcoated hookup caught in the crossfire. “I understand you probably suffered severe brain damage during the reanimation process,” she tells him at a moment of particularly radical absurdity, and that’s certainly the fate of Mary’s creation here. Beattie, who was one of the original architects of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise before the Elliot/Rossio takeover, made an exemplary directorial debut with his sensitive 2010 adaptation of John Marsden’s Australian YA classic Tomorrow, When the War Began, and recycles several of that film’s leads in supporting roles. But they haven’t been enough to save its resurrected flesh from a tomatometer rating of 96% rotting.
Some key refugees from Beattie’s biggest franchise reteam for 47 RONIN, a high-risk attempt to establish a Hollywood outpost of Chushingura cinema by supernaturalising the events of Ako 1703 on the stylistic, if hardly the tonal, model of Pirates of the Caribbean (from which key franchise personnel have been poached, including costume designer Penny Rose and editor Stuart Baird, himself an occasional director of some note whose credits include Star Trek: Nemesis), with a Hossein Amini script and a budget well north of $200m. The latest and most commercially catastrophic casualty of Hollywood’s turbulent courtship of the East Asian market, it’s turned out a surprisingly respectful and often beautifully staged treatment of Japan’s national legend, notwithstanding Keanu Reeves as a preposterous half-blood second lead, a tremendous cast of Japanese screen legends made to perform in halting English, and a radical reconception of the story as driven by Conanesque sorcery. (One credit is for “Lovecraftian samurai”.) The mass-seppuku ending, which for a long time you fear they may be going to bottle out of, is a tricky sell for western audiences, has had to be tempered with the promise of a Winter’s Tale-style love beyond death: “My father told me that this world was only a preparation for the next, that all we can hope is to leave it having loved and been loved … I will search for you through a thousand worlds and ten thousand lifetimes until I find you.” It’s a noble undertaking, but hasn’t been able to save the film from re-enacting its heroes’ fate with Universal’s money.
The real truth behind the making of Frankenstein’s monster is vouchsafed by Tom Hiddleston’s vampire Beat in Jim Jarmusch’s ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE: “Byron was a pompous ass, but Mary was delicious.” Jarmusch’s vampires live less like the Cullens than the Burroughses, swinging between Tangier and Detroit in an ever-riskier quest to score uninfected mortal (their term is “zombie”) plasma while the world around them slides into chaos. (“Have the water wars started yet, or is it still just about the oil?”) With his heightened sense of transience, Hiddleston predicts that the present-day Detroit foreseen by Verhoeven is just a step on the road to something more like the Padilha version: “This place will rise again. When the cities of the south will burn, this place will bloom.” For an hour or so nothing much happens: she hangs out with John Hurt’s undead and inexplicably aged Kit Marlowe (who all too predictably owns up to ghosting Shakespeare), he lurks in his home studio making not terribly good guitar drone music that everybody applauds as wonderful and just happens to be made by Jarmusch’s band. But then Mia Wasikowska crashes into their lives from LA (“zombie central”) as the vampire version of the maddening and out-of-control houseguest that alternative living inexorably attracts, and soon their cosily decadent lives have been turned irrevocably arse-up. The zombie-bashing elitism gets increasingly offensive, the dialogue is rather clumsy and on-the-nose, and the historical namedropping all a bit middlebrow and retro, with our heroes booking night flights under the names Stephen Daedalus and Daisy Buchanan, and Hiddleston’s gallery of hero portraits a student bedroom of countercultural heroes. But the cast are lovely, with Hiddleston and Wasikowska particular standouts, and a film that can stop its climax dead for a five-minute live number by Yasmine Hamdan has some of its priorities in the right place.
History is viewed through figures from ancient myth out of the childhood of the world i
n MR PEABODY & SHERMAN, DreamWorks’ reanimation of the fifty-year-old Rocky & Bullwinkle segment series about a supersmart beagle chrononaut who treats his adoptive human son to mildly educational cartoon fun in the original WABAC Machine. None of this means a thing to UK viewers, but it probably doesn’t need to, in what comes out as a bewildering defence of innocent familial zoophily in pitting cartoon Bill & Ted hijinks with Cleo, Leo, and a horse’s-buttload of Greeks against the brutal and speciesist social services who simply want to tear families apart for the joy of it. Though there’s a romantic interest for Sherman, the film is primarily interested in the cross-species love of adoptive sons and fathers, particularly in the usual Hollywood absence of anything resembling a mother. But as Leonardo sagely advises, “Children are not machines, Peabody. I know, because I tried to build one. It was creepy.” And so, quite comedically, it proves.
Fathers and sons without sisters and moms are the transcendent destination of THE LEGO MOVIE, the manic entrance of Warners’ new animation arm to the lucrative family market on a tide of intellectual-property hookups between studio, toymaker, and DC. From the Legofied logos to the Wes Anderson credits, nothing about this insane parade of world-hopping set pieces and blink-miss rewind gags stands still long enough to be evaluated for sensemaking. But it’s thought deeply if not coherently about the metaphysics of creative play, as the various Lego themed universes turn out themselves to be interlocking elements in a stratified creation whose upper reality is our own world and whose unseen masters are playing out an eternal unseen family drama over the right to invest our toys with the pretence of life. Amid all the family-certificated “mild fantasy violence and very mild language” (“Darn darn darn darny darn!”), what’s at stake is nothing less than every audience member’s right to fulfil the prophecy, return with the elixir through the cardboard tube of destiny, and “be the most important, most talented, and most interesting person in the universe”. As the earworm says, it’s made but it’s also true: everything is awesome when you’re living a dream.
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