MOVIE REVIEW : Adaptation of Kafka’s ‘Trial’ Better Suited to the Stage

“The Trial,” which reopens the NuWilshire after earthquake repairs, is precisely that for the viewer, for this new adaptation of the Franz Kafka novel could scarcely be more of an ordeal. Within minutes you’re wishing you were instead watching Orson Welles’ 1963 version with Anthony Perkins--not that it was all that great, but it was far more absorbing.

One would think that Harold Pinter, master of ambiguity and implication, would be the perfect choice to adapt this prophetic warning of the advent of the faceless totalitarian state with its accompanying paranoia. The trouble is that Pinter’s surprisingly talky treatment is lots more suitable for the stage than the screen. Not helping matters is David Jones’ relentlessly prosaic and impersonal direction. In such circumstances authentic Prague locales, shot in realistic color, simply underline the artificial theatricality of the entire undertaking.

It doesn’t seem possible that a film with a cast headed by Kyle MacLachlan and including Anthony Hopkins, Jason Robards and David Thewlis could be all bad, but it is: They have all been directed as if they’re performing under a proscenium instead of a camera. Since “The Trial” never comes to life, they always seem to be acting rather than becoming their characters.

As the hapless Josef K, MacLachlan would be ideal in a more imaginative version. He captures the bourgeois smugness of Kafka’s senior bank clerk who meets his arrest on charges never defined with a mixture of exasperation and disdain. Indeed, he refuses to consider the danger of his plight at just about the same time that countless intelligent people who ought to have been taking Hitler seriously were regarding him as a joke.

Robards plays K’s bedridden lawyer, Hopkins an enigmatic priest and Thewlis one of the warders who tells K he’s under arrest. Hopkins at least gets to underplay, but everyone else has been directed to bluster about, as if Jones were straining to inject some vitality. But this “Trial” is embalmed from start to finish.

* MPAA rating: Unrated. Times guidelines: It includes some violence, and heavy treatment of complex political and philosophical themes.

‘The Trial’

Kyle MacLachlan: Josef K

Anthony Hopkins: The Priest

Jason Robards: Huld

David Thewlis: Franz

An Angelika Films presentation. Director Jeff Pollack. David Jones. Producer Louis Marks. Executive producers Kobi Jaeger, Reniero Compostella, Mark Shivas. Screenplay by Harold Pinter; from the novel by Franz Kafka. Cinematographer Phil Maheux. Editor John Stohart. Music Carl Davis. Art director Jim Holloway. Running time: 2 hours.

* In exclusive run at the NuWilshire, 1314 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica. (310) 394-8099.