Fidelity

There's no correlation between how faithful a movie adaptation is to its source material and how good it is. Accusing a movie of infidelity is a lot like accusing a movie of historical inaccuracy. As I wrote in this post:

Sometimes I get the feeling that unsympathetic viewers will bring in a concept like "historical accuracy" to make their argument against a movie stronger: it gives the impression that they are holding the movie up to an objective standard. This is a suspect maneuver, IMO, because most viewers (general audience members, film critics, and film buffs alike) are not at all consistent in terms of which movies they hold to that standard. "Historical accuracy" is like a club they pick up when they feel the need to beat on movies they don't like.

So we can use "source infidelity" as a clubm, but also as a hook. That's basically what I was doing in my post on The Spirit. It isn't the fact that Frank Miller's movie isn't faithful to Will Eisner's comics that makes it a bad movie, but comparing what it does unsuccessfully to what Eisner's comics do successfully is useful and illuminating. More importantly, perhaps, it is a natural comparison to make.

We can also talk about different kinds of infidelities. The movies of Atonement and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe all stick reasonably close to their source novels in terms of incident, character, and theme, but fail to translate the sensibility of the original, because they substitute the conventions of contemporary, mainstream narrative cinema for the more personal voice of the respective novelists.

The Narnia movie takes C.S. Lewis' "stuff" and presents it as a souped-up action/adventure fantasy, with none of the fragility of the original story. Despite its heaviness as an allegory, I think that Lion shows a light touch (especially when compared to Tolkien's more elaborate fantasy novels). The Narnia books are more bedtime story than fantasy epic, something that the movie completely misses.

The movie of Atonement is high-energy and twisty-turny - a period melodrama played like The Usual Suspects. It's a choice that works (on a certain level), but it also jettisons the more contemplative aspects of the original novel (which happen to be those elements which made the book memorable). The effect is that the movie is more intense than the book, but also less gripping - or maybe less grippable: there's not as much there to think over once the movie's done.

The Spirit

Kim Thompson says that The Spirit is bad in a way that suggests Frank Miller made exactly the movie he set out to make. I think he may be right, but a big part of what made watching the movie such a disappointing experience was that there were hints - around the edges - of what a better Spirit movie might look like.

Specifically: in the opening and closing voice-overs, the Spirit rhapsodizes about his beloved city, but the city plays no part in the movie. Where the Gothams of either the Burton or Nolan Batman movies are fully-realized places, Central City in Miller's movie is barely even a background: to call it abstract is giving it too much credit. Calling it generic, even, implies that there's some form there that's fulfilling certain conventions, but there's just nothing.

Anyway - that absence points to how Miller should have made this movie: with Central City as the main character and the Spirit operating in the background. Hey - he could even have split the movie up into three separate stories - maybe even stories from Will Eisner's comics - with some recurring characters to give us a sense of a living city.

For me, it isn't a question of whether or not Miller should have been more faithful to the original comics. However, completely ignoring what made the original comics interesting and sucessful - or rather, giving it lip service but not following through - seems like a bad idea.

This happens to tie into my Comic Book Pet Theory #2 (#1 is the thing where I say that Watchmen is all about gravity and that Dave Gibbons doesn't get enough credit for it): apart from a few early homages to The Spirit in Daredevil, Frank Miller's work bears no relationship to anything Will Eisner has ever done. Miller keeps trying to pass himself off as an "Eisner acolyte", but they are completely different artists. Eisner is interested in the city - in its geography and in the way that geography shapes the lives of its denizens. It's the line that runs through his work from The Spirit to the graphic novels. His heirs are Ben Katchor and Chris Ware. Miller is an action/adventure cartoonist working with outsized figure-drawing and Steranko-inspired page layouts. Though I don't think he's ever said this, he's a follower of Kirby, and, to the extent that you can talk about his innovations, the main one is that he either (a) puts exaggerated Kirby-style super-hero figures into non-super hero genres (Sin City, 300) or (b) brings various noir elements to bear on super-hero comics (The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One). (I think his best super-hero work is The Dark Knight Strikes Again partly because he's dealing with super-hero comics on their own terms, even if he seems to find those terms somewhat retarded).

It's (unfortunately) not surprising then, that a cartoonist whose work centers on figure-drawing would make a movie that is so (detrimentally) "figure"-centric (and I don't say actor-centric because none of the people on screen are creating characters or playing objectives or doing any of the other things we like to see actors do). That's partly why Central City is such a non-entity: Miller is only interested in it as a backdrop for highly-stylized images of movie stars and would-be movie stars. The problem, as Michael Barrier would point out, is that, the drawn figure tends to be much more expressive and much more congenial to exaggerated expression than bodies on film. So Miller is trying to do something he knows, but he's working in a medium where it's very hard to do that kind of thing and he's not using the right kinds of tools.

I'd still argue that what he's trying to do, doesn't really make a good fit with the material, although that becomes a side point as Miller doesn't even do what he seems to be trying to do all that well.