Does a Solid Play Translate Into a Solid Movie Experience?

Hollywood often is attracted to a play for its writing and simultaneously offended by its lack of wide-open spaces. A scene in the new film version of Scott McPherson’s play “Marvin’s Room” reeks of this ambivalence. Bessie (Diane Keaton) is trying to win the trust of her juvenile delinquent nephew Hank, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. So she lets him drive her car.

With one quick turn of the wheel, Hank commandeers the auto over a curb and down to the ocean. For a second it looks as if he’s going straight into the surf. Naturally, his aunt looks concerned. Hank is on release from a mental institution for setting his mother’s house on fire. But in a moment Hank straightens out the car and speeds not headlong into the water but jauntily alongside it, expressing his boyish joie de vivre, with Bessie now squealing with joy.

Why is this scene so phony? Is it because Hollywood has overused this particular cliche so extravagantly? (Both “Terms of Endearment” and its new sequel, “The Evening Star,” feature the same waterfront joy ride during the courtship and reunion of Shirley MacLaine and Jack Nicholson, as if to insist the characters are not emotionally near-geriatric. And let’s not even discuss the meant-to-be-joyful ride a blind macho man takes on the streets of Manhattan in “Scent of a Woman.”)

In “Marvin’s Room,” this Hollywood shorthand is an awkward attempt to “open up” the play while evoking character bonding that may no longer be expressed in words and in standard theater medium shot.

The making of a solid film from a solid play is always problematic; both the pitfalls and bonuses of that process are on display this month in three films adapted by the playwrights.

McPherson completed the screenplay for “Marvin’s Room” shortly before he died. It was shot by theater director Jerry Zaks and, joy ride aside, the film is close-up heavy and visually claustrophobic. Zaks flattens out the bright absurdism of the play’s medical scenes. Onstage, Bessie’s physician, Dr. Wally, is a veritable idiot, and his scenes convey the horror of the hospital in an unusually cheerful way. On film, Dr. Wally is Robert De Niro, looking smashing with gray sideburns, merely kind and befuddled.

So some tone is lost. On the plus side, Miramax got what it paid for when it bought the script. The actors, who also include Meryl Streep and Gwen Verdon, shine. McPherson offers them characters with a coherent emotional through-line, a luxury often missing in films written by several credited and several more uncredited writers.

For the film version of his play, Jon Robin Baitz opened up “The Substance of Fire” in the best possible way. He all but threw out his flawed second act and rewrote it, an unusual act for a playwright seeking to preserve on celluloid a highly regarded play. (It probably helped that Baitz trusted his director, Daniel Sullivan, who showed great sensitivity both on stage and on screen.)

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That second act finds the embittered widower Isaac Geldhart, a publisher of books on the Holocaust, losing himself to the world. Having alienated his three children and everyone around him, Isaac (in a tight, moving performance by Ron Rifkin) begins to lose his mind. In the play he is rescued by the arrival of a second-act social worker, a character who no one cares about and who seems uniquely ill-equipped to reach the impossible Isaac.

In the movie, the social worker still comes. But Isaac’s epiphany and his reawakened desire to reach out to his children comes from within, prompted from the well of a newly invented grief. The story’s conclusion is more satisfying and the main characters are better delineated. Apparently, to achieve this, Baitz needed the additional characters and settings that the film allowed him.

Arthur Miller had already had a “Crucible” film experience from which to benefit before he attempted the current adaptation, starring Winona Ryder and Daniel Day-Lewis. As Miller recalls in an essay, the first Jean-Paul Sartre adaptation--a 1957 Raymond Rouleau film called “Les Sorcieres de Salem,” in which Miller was not involved--was “overly Marxist.” Sartre saw the hysteria that fueled the Salem witch trials as “coolly manufactured by a ruling class of big proprietors whose aim is to enslave the poorer farmers and the indigent.” This time around, director Nicholas Hytner set “The Crucible” not on the Baltic coast but firmly in the northern Massachusetts landscape where the trials and the bewildering events that preceded them actually took place.

It was also in Salem that Miller discovered in court files the existence of a girl named Abigail who had been dismissed from the employ of a certain John and Elizabeth Proctor. Abigail named Elizabeth but not John as a practicing witch, despite the nudging of the town counsel to include John. When Miller found that fascinating detail, he says, he found his story.

The 1953 play has always been read as a direct parable for the events that transpired before the House Un-American Activities Committee. It took a British director to prove that by unfolding “The Crucible” in its original setting, this story of law run amok has an impact that reaches well beyond Joseph McCarthy.

Hytner uses the wildness of the landscape to draw the story of a bratty and strong-willed young woman thwarted in love, empowered by her elders for their own greedy purposes. We learn a lot about Abigail by seeing her up close; even the torn seams in her dresses bespeak the hardness of her life.

The hysteria that follows from her charges grows naturally out of that landscape, whose raw lines echo the dangerous paths the characters walk. The “opening up” of the play also includes a powerful new last scene in which we see first-hand the devastation wrought by Abigail, and the story now ends on a gutsier note than did the stage version.

In the preface to the published screenplay, Miller notes that he has avoided turning his plays into films because “the adaptation process most often seems to make less of the original” and that for years he had believed that plays are propelled by words rather than by images. That division was a stark one; obviously there are images in plays and words and ideas in movies.

But one understands Miller’s prejudice against filming stage works. Look at the movies of the musicals “Oklahoma!” and especially “Carousel.” They’re practically unwatchable. If we depended on these films (instead of actual onstage revivals) to communicate the power of Rodgers and Hammerstein, they would have no reputation left at all.

Still, the risk for playwrights is worth taking, to both genres. Thank goodness for the film version of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” If Miller has been converted, then let us all. Plays can contribute mightily to the making of good films, as long as no one condescends and gratuitous joy rides are kept to a minimum. And, what’s more surprising, movies can deepen our understanding of plays.