Thoughts on ‘Lightness’ and ‘The Dead’

Here are two axioms. One: A merry-go-round is a dazzling contraption, a machinery of joy in the truest sense of the word; and capable of dealing a 5-year-old such an offside whack as to set up a lifetime susceptibility to the notion that wonder may lurk around the stoniest corner. And two, Bach is incomparably superior to Offenbach.

But it’s Offenbach every time for your merry-go-round; Bach simply doesn’t do.

And so with movies. It is not quite axiomatic, and there are exceptions; but by and large the best books do not turn into the best films. Their music does not get the merry-go-round going.

As it happens, the past year has seen an unaccustomed upsurge in something that was much more common 30 or 40 years ago: the adaptation of major or minor literary masterpieces into film. I am thinking, in particular, of James Joyce’s “The Dead,” Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” J. G. Ballard’s “Empire of the Sun,” and Brian Moore’s “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne.”

All of these were far more than respectable efforts. There was at least a measure of artistry in all of them, and more than a little daring. I find it hard, for example, to imagine a better job being done with “The Dead” than was accomplished by the late John Huston and his son and daughter.

All the same, I don’t think it can be argued that any of the four films achieved the stature of their literary models. For that matter, though I am hardly qualified to pronounce on the 20 best films of all time, I feel pretty sure that none of them is based on a book that anyone would put on a 20-all-time-best list.

In a way, that’s perfectly natural. A movie is not simply a different way of packaging a book, but an original and independent creature. Why should lightning strike twice? The stature of Verdi’s “Otello” does not rest on the fact that Shakespeare wrote a very good play by the same name. The allure, or lack thereof, of a Peach Melba is unrelated to the quality of Dame Nelly’s singing.

In the case of “The Dead” and “The Unbearable Lightness,” though, it is possible to see rather concretely in what respects a film version can approximate the strength of the original, and how it must fall short. I am sure that this is true for the other two titles I mentioned, but these will do.

Kundera’s novel holds its events, many of them tragic, at a distance that does not diminish their impact--quite the contrary--but keeps them from overwhelming us in a blur of sadness, anger and rhetoric.

Telling the story of Tomas, Tereza, Sabine and Franz, and their oscillations between commitment and evasion, between devotion and hedonism--all set against the rending dissonance of contemporary Czechoslovakia--Kundera uses philosophical epigrams, digression, narrative fragmentation, humor and poignance in a perpetually rippling balance.

There are no climaxes or, rather, there are dozens and dozens of climaxes. They put the death of a dog, the lovers’ anxieties, small and large movements of the spirit, dreams, the Russian invasion, and the ludicrous comedy of totalitarianism all at the same level.

The film cannot find a way to maintain such a balance; to voice the intellect that bonds the chaos of events together while asserting their variousness. It substitutes a few big climaxes for Kundera’s riverlike flow.

The Russian invasion and the popular resistance, which occupy no more than a few paragraphs in the book, become a major set scene. In the book, the session of nude photography between Tomas’ wife, Tereza, and his mistress, Sabine, is one more brief and sparkling variation on Tereza’s quest to understand her husband. In the film, it is a full-undress essay in suggestiveness of various crimes.

The dog’s death, whose pathos Kundera conveys mainly through Tereza’s delicately surreal dream that her pet is giving birth to “two rolls and a bee,” becomes one more teary movie dog-death.

Because it requires things to watch rather than imagine, the film, time and again, upsets the book’s marvelous balance by shooting what can be shot, and by playing out in a dramatized scene what is suggested in a sentence or two.

There are exceptions. The pale, wondering face of Juliette Binoche as Tereza, and the restless comical torment in the face of Lena Olin as Sabine, do suggest some of Kundera’s firefly images. The death of Tomas and Tereza, conveyed simply by a whitening of the screen, is as quick, light and effective as anything in the book. Generally, though, the heaviness crowds the lightness out almost entirely.

“The Dead” makes an even neater contrast. The film is at its best in what, in Joyce’s story, is a lengthy and subtle setting of the scene for what will eventually occur. We see Gabriel Conroy and his wife moving among the conviviality, the constraints, the anxieties and all the cross-currents of a musical evening given by two old friends.

It is possible that in the story all these tensions are conveyed more economically and with a greater canniness. But take one of the currents: the resentment concealed by the maid over her multiple duties and the patronizing if amiable way she is treated by the guests. A shot of her face as she helps Conroy with his boots perfectly conveys her genuine liking of the man and her smoldering discontent.

Or take another current: the gnawing worry of the two aged hostesses that a perpetually inebriated guest will arrive before Gabriel, whom they are counting on to handle him. The two bent figures hurrying to peer over the banister each time the bell rings tells us at least as much as Joyce does.

And more. There are moments when the film is able to open up the events of the evening, to flesh out the life and stress that Joyce signals in a more cramped kind of emotional shorthand.

For Joyce, of course, the congested evening and Conroy’s febrile mastery of its social complexities are simply the launching pad for the story’s flight. And where Joyce begins to ascend, the film begins to drop.

Back in the hotel room, Anjelica Huston is very affecting as she relives the story of her long-ago love for a would-be suitor who died young. It is a delicately told remembrance; and it discharges the tension that we have seen in her face during the party.

But in Joyce’s story, the focus is quite different. It is on Gabriel; this kind, busy, futile man whose energy cannot overcome his sense of failure. His wife’s story reflects back on his or any man’s inability to make a kingdom out of a relationship. The story’s majestic final page, describing the snow falling over Ireland, opens this out to an unforgettable image of the decline of life and the victory of time.

The camera is unable to keep the focus on Gabriel. And it is unable to do anything with the snow except to show it falling. Joyce’s immortal image becomes a picture of frozen white stuff.