Adapting Downbeat Books Can Be an Uphill Battle

In Jacquelyn Mitchard’s best-selling novel “The Deep End of the Ocean,” the main character is a self-absorbed and unhappy wife and mother who isn’t pleasant to be around even before her son gets swiped. In fact, she is mooning over an old lover (with whom she’ll later have a brief affair) just moments before the boy disappears.

When the story comes to the screen next month in a movie starring Michelle Pfeiffer, the old flame is as absent as the missing child. Nor will Pfeiffer’s character drink to excess as she does in the book or have quite so sharp a tongue. And before the abduction, instead of being self-absorbed, our heroine is just forgetful.

Such is the way of movie adaptation--edges get smoothed, scenes deleted, dialogue added or changed, all according to some abstruse calculus. And if in the end the film retains any of the original work’s essence (and not just its flavor), all one can hope for is that what remains turns out to have been the part worth preserving.

Mitchard says that by and large she likes the movie from Columbia Studios. “The essence of what I wrote about--the importance of family and identity and the bonds that sort of defy [impossible odds] are there,” she says. “It’s present in the movie.” Still, she says she found the changes disconcerting.

Great books make lousy movies, and lousy books make great ones--that’s the common wisdom. Of course it’s more complicated than that. (Sometimes, as with “The English Patient,” good books yield movies that are quite respectable.) But Ulu Grosbard, the director of “Deep End,” subscribes to a corollary of the old maxim: Movies, with their time restraints and necessary reliance on the visual, can surpass the quality of a book only when the book is not very complex to begin with, he says. Nuances inevitably are lost.

In an influential essay from the 1950s, French film theorist Andre Bazin spoke of cinema as “the great leveler” that simplifies and alters the novels it adapts, sometimes to the point of unrecognizability. “When someone makes a film of ‘Madame Bovary’ in Hollywood, the difference of aesthetic level between the work of Flaubert and the average American film being so great,” he wrote, “the result is a standard American production that has only one thing wrong with it--that it is still called ‘Madame Bovary.’ ”

“Deep End” isn’t “Madame Bovary.” But it is a skilled and willfully disturbing work of popular fiction that poses tough challenges to a filmmaker: Its 434-page story spans nine years; its protagonist is unsympathetic for much of its length; and the subject matter is grim.

But why, if the book poses such challenges, would anyone want to make a movie of it in the first place? In this case, Grosbard says part of the reason is that he’s never before seen a film that dealt with the issues the book raises. But the same might be asked about other movies based on difficult-to-adapt books that now are headed to theaters. They include Paramount’s “Angela’s Ashes,” Frank McCourt’s often bleak memoir about growing up poor in Ireland, and “Girl Interrupted,” from Columbia Studios, a devastating memoir about madness that largely takes place in a mental institution and has a very uncinematically loose, collage-like structure.

The track record for adapting these kinds of books isn’t good. Last year “Beloved,” a famously “difficult” book that was turned into a movie, was shunned by filmgoers.

“Beloved” focused on an escaped slave (played by Oprah Winfrey) who kills her child rather than allow her to be taken into slavery. Some books--even some difficult books--provide their own road maps; it’s easy to see the story’s beginning, middle and end. This is true of “Deep End.” But with others, such as “Beloved” or “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” the 1987 film adapted from the Milan Kundera novel, the filmmaker is on his or her own.

In translating “Beloved,” for example, director Jonathan Demme made unconventional choices that perhaps befit a book written in a lyrical, nonlinear style that emphasizes internal thought processes over action. But his decision to allow the main characters to disappear from the narrative for most of the last part and to include an eight-minute-long flashback in the middle of the film--choices that made the movie feel like three distinct and unintegrated stories--undoubtedly distanced the movie from the audience.

The movies now headed for screens are based on books that are not nearly as daunting as “Beloved,” but they all offer their own challenges.

“Girl, Interrupted” is the 1993 memoir of Susannah Kaysen, a young woman who was hospitalized in a mental institution in 1967 for two years. Director James Mangold says the story was in development for Winona Ryder for several years before he became involved. The first thing he did was rewrite the script.

The book, which Mangold describes as “very episodic and observational” and is written from the perspective of the mental patient, does not have a typical Hollywood story line with clear causes and effects. Mangold needed to find a way into the story. He sought a “personal kind of myth” through which he could view the story to illuminate hidden layers.

He looked in some unexpected places, much as he did with “Cop Land,” his 1997 movie, which starred Robert De Niro and Sylvester Stallone. “Cop Land” was an original story, but like “Girl Interrupted” it was drawn from real experiences, in this case Mangold’s observations growing up in the Hudson River Valley, north of New York. He imposed a mythic structure, which he found in westerns and morality plays, to infuse the story with what he calls “a John Ford-William Wyler energy.”

With “Girl Interrupted” Mangold wanted to go beyond the obvious models of films about mental illness such as “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” He finally found within the story surprising similarities to “The Wizard of Oz.”

The comparison may seem perverse, but Mangold notes that while “Girl, Interrupted” on the surface may seem bleak, it is full of wit and love among the patients who are trapped in the “parallel universe” of mental illness. Kaysen writes with great clarity but also with “remarkable ambiguity” about what it is like in the world of the insane.

“It’s like a cloud that sort of blows into a girl’s life,” says Mangold, speaking by telephone from Harrisburg, Pa., on the first day of shooting last month. “ ‘The Wizard of Oz’ is a very similar situation--a confused girl enters a great, marvelous, amazing universe,” he says. “There is the same dreamlike quality.”

The “Wizard of Oz” comparison seems so natural now, but before Mangold hit on it he was going in a totally different direction. He wanted to personify the disease of mental illness, turn it into a presence that the Kaysen character could interact with.

“A lot of people talk about disease almost like they’re interacting with a thing,” he says. “They say my disease. . . . And just as there’s no explanation really for Freddy Krueger, there’s no easy explanation for this. But I realized really quickly that turning her disease into some kind of being was going to be awful.”

Translating “The Deep End of the Ocean” to the screen did not involve this level of intellectualization. Because it is a heavily plotted, conventionally told story, the filmmakers largely retained the book’s structure and themes. The main struggle, says Grosbard, who wrote the screenplay, was paring the story down to its essentials.

With any book adaptation you know going in that you will have to lose 75% of the story, he says. Characters and subplots have to be sacrificed in pursuit of a simple linear narrative, or “through line.” Stephen Schiff’s first screenplay more closely followed the way the book is laid out. After dealing with the boy’s disappearance in 1985, the novel follows the family through 1994, when it emerges stronger from its ordeal.

The finished movie eliminates the middle period.

“I did shoot some of that [from the original script],” says Grosbard, “but I realized when we were cutting it that it took too long to get to the focus of the story, which is what happens when Ben [the boy] comes back.”

After the boy returns, the parents (played by Pfeiffer and Treat Williams) must recognize that the child who returns is different from their memory of him. He is 12 years old, relatively well-adjusted, living happily with the man he has always thought was his father. He doesn’t remember his actual parents. As Pfeiffer’s character says to her husband at one point, “It’s like we are the kidnappers now.”

The parents must find the wisdom and courage to do what is best for the child.

Mitchard, a newspaper columnist in Milwaukee as well as a novelist, says the book was influenced by the story of Kimberly Mays, the Florida girl who was mistakenly switched at birth. She faced terrible adjustment problems when, as a teenager, she was returned to her biological father. As the mother of both biological and adopted children, Mitchard says she has thought a lot about the question of a child’s identity and the meaning of family.

“When you write a story, you sort of have a bunch of newspaper clips and stories you’ve heard all jammed in your pocket,” she says. “Then they get washed with the jeans and they get all mushed together. That’s what happened here, only my brain was the washing machine. . . .

“I wanted to be careful [while writing the book] that I didn’t make anything easy,” says Mitchard, who was not involved in adapting her novel. “In the movie, some of the things had to be easy.”

This is true not only of story and plot intricacies but also characterizations.

“I think that I wrote Beth [the Pfeiffer character] the way I thought that she should be,” she says, diplomatically sidestepping the question of whether the changes. “I know that it was a huge struggle for readers to accept Beth, and it was only after reading the book and discussing it with people that they could then perhaps come to admire and love someone they couldn’t like.”

Both she and Grosbard note, though, that a movie does not have the benefit of internal monologue and the expressiveness of written descriptions that can make off-putting actions understandable. And Grosbard opted not to use an off-screen narrator.

Mitchard says Beth’s portrayal was softened in part because her angry and troubled personality overpowered the story. She speculates that if the character had been played by, say, Meg Ryan, an actress with innate likability, it might have been different.

“[The character] has a sharp tongue, even as she is conceived in the movie, and it was sort of submerging everything else,” the author says. “Meg Ryan can say all kinds of sharp things and you’d still think she was a cuddly little person. Michelle Pfeiffer’s not like that. When she looks icy, it’s like Medea. So she and the director thought they had to pull back on Beth’s rage.”

Grosbard says the changes were made for economy--not a desire to make Pfeiffer’s character likable. “Michelle is willing to go anywhere,” he says. “She’s fearless.”

For example, he originally wanted to include the character with whom Beth has an affair. “I really wanted to keep that in, and in the first draft I tried to,” he says. Grosbard realized later, though, that he couldn’t afford the time to provide the context for why Beth has sex with her old flame. “Without context it would have a totally different meaning,” he says.

Mitchard wishes the film could have retained the character of the psychiatrist who helps the family’s other son cope with what happened to his brother, and the Williams character’s illness, which provides an important plot element in the book. It also bothers her that the scene explaining the title got cut.

“That was sad for me,” she says, “that people could walk out of the theater and say, ‘Why was it called “The Deep End of the Ocean”?’ There’s no ocean in it.”

None of this ruined the experience of watching the film for her, however. “When I finally relaxed after the first 15 minutes or so and tried to experience it as I would if I were an average moviegoer, there was an honesty to it that is not often present in films that I’ve seen about families,” she says.

“If you’re an author you’re supposed to be up in a garret drinking and crying, I guess, because your book has been taken and tarnished,” she says, mocking the common expectation. “I don’t understand that. I don’t see how the worst movie in the world can tarnish my book--[the book] is still there.”