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Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Graham Greene on the Art of Storytelling



Stephen Holden’s review in last Thursday’s New York Times of Rowan Joffe’s new adaptation of Graham Greene’s 1938 thriller, Brighton Rock, emphasized the way in which the film distances itself from the book’s theological preoccupations. Brighton Rock is the story of a small-time teenage hood named Pinkie, whose “perfect murder” has a loose thread that slowly but ineluctably unravels the whole plan, jeopardizing Pinkie’s dreams of leading the best gang in Brighton. It also jeopardizes his soul, so Pinkie reckons. Pinkie’s Catholic upbringing, though long formally discarded, still provides the dominant voice inside his conscience, which torments him as he is forced to take ever riskier and more ruthless measures to protect himself from his pursuers.

“By discarding most of the theological debate,” writes Holden of Rowan Joffe’s adaptation, “the movie is no longer a passion play but a gritty and despairing noir. That’s good enough for me.”

But not good enough for Greene himself, who had much higher aspirations for his storytelling. Besides being a brilliant novelist, Greene was also one of the most perceptive film reviewers and critics of film of the 20th century. In his 1937 essay, “Subjects and Stories,” written at more or less the same time as Brighton Rock, Greene considers the tremendous cultural power of the cinema, a power he believed had been largely untapped by mainstream films. He affirms his ideal for the cinema, and of storytelling in general, in the opening lines of the essay, starting with some lines from Chekhov about novelists:

‘The best of them are realistic and paint life as it is, but because every line is permeated, as with a juice, by awareness of a purpose, you feel, besides life as it is, also life as it ought to be, and this captivates you.’ This description of an artist’s theme [continues Greene] has never, I think, been bettered…

To portray life as it is…but also life as it ought to be. This, for Greene, is the storyteller’s task. In Brighton Rock, Greene saw fit to set his teenage hood against a supernatural backdrop, and so to accord Pinkie the respect of allowing him to wrestle like a man with the angel’s voice inside his conscience. According to Stephen Holden, Rowan Joffe’s film does not accord Pinkie such respect—or at least not so well as Greene’s novel does. Writes Holden: “If you strip away the book’s Roman Catholicism, which the movie mostly does, its story fits right into the nihilistic mood of today.”

Having yet to see the movie, I cannot judge how far Rowan Joffe’s film ventures into nihilism. But I am leery that, in soft-pedaling Greene’s concerns in his novel with life as it ought to be, this new adaptation of Brighton Rock only underscores life as it is in a postmodern world which has been, for many, drained of all meaning.

6 comments:

  1. Daniel, Thanks. Inspiring. It precipitated this:
    http://moralpremise.blogspot.com/2011/08/life-as-it-is-vs-as-it-ought-to-be.html

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  2. Thanks for posting this - I heard of the film adaptation and am anxious to see it and review it. No surprise about the stripping of the supernatural depth - we saw the same thing with the latest adaptation of "Brideshead Revisited." (I'm still waiting for a film version of "The Power and the Glory", one of the most cinematic books I've ever read!)

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  3. Thanks. I so enjoy your blog. Pointed to it on mine today, God bless.

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  4. Thanks Stan, Matthew and Ana for your comments today. Stan--your post was a feast of rich speculation on current cinema. I am especially intrigued by what you say about BELLA, about which I also had some reservations....Matthew, don't get me started on that awful remake of BRIDESHEAD, I might blow a fuse (Waugh is one of my favorite writers). They completely threw out Charles's entire conversion! Greene's The Power and the Glory is a marvelous work--a great film of it would be a treasure...and Ana, thanks too for your compliments on this blog. You and Stan and Matthew are all doing such good work on yours. Keep it up!

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  5. Thomas Jefferson re-wrote the New Testament- left out the miracles, Virgin Birth and Resurrection. Great precedent for today's Theists or is that Atheists?

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  6. Matthew:
    "The Power and the Glory" was made into a not so great John Ford film "The Fugitive" in 1947. It hardly resembles the book. It starred Henry Fonda, Dolores Del Rio, Ward Bond, J Carrol Naish, and Pedro Armendariz.
    For more info, see my 2009 book "Christians in the Movies: A Century of Saints and Sinners" published by Rowman and Littlefield. It looks at the portrayal of Christians in about200 films from 1905 to 2008.
    Peter E. Dans

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