The movie turns Adam, Waugh's cipher of a writer-protagonist, a juvenile so trivial the association with the fall of man and original sin seems (purposely) overblown, into a romantic hero. This changes the genre of the movie from an all-out epic satire into an ironic romance with a heroic turnaround on Adam's part. Late in the book Adam sighs, "Oh, Nina, what a lot of parties," and then in parenthesis the narrator describes the variety of parties these shiny insects have been swarming to for years on end, leading up to the incomplete phrase, "Those vile bodies." In the movie the parenthesis is given as a speech to Adam, suggesting he's become fed up and is gaining insight that the Adam of the book is incapable of. (And also suggesting an identity of Adam with Waugh that in the book could function in only the most self-accusatory way.)
In order to sustain Adam's maturation, the script hacks off the subsequent episode in which he takes the married Nina to Doubting Hall for Christmas, leaving behind a (rubber) check for Ginger in repayment of the amount for which Adam had previously sold his interest in Nina to him. Adam, Doubting, Christmas--does this sound like an expendable episode in a Catholic author's work? Instead the movie changes the book's era from the "near future" to the historical late '30s and adds a coda in which Nina works in a war-production factory and Adam, having got the money from the major, gives it to Ginger and moves in with Nina to live contentedly broke. You'd think a gay English director with a literary bent would be familiar enough with Auden to know that the atmosphere of the '20s and '30s aren't interchangeable, but what's really dispiriting is the way the movie turns blitzed-out London into a re-education camp for Adam and Nina.
The movie doesn't trust us to enjoy Waugh's vision and be improved by it, so it keeps senselessly propounding Waugh's disgust with the high-society revels outright. The taxi driver, for instance, doesn't say "Doubting 'All" but he does complain to Adam that an experience like the Great War would be good for the young people nowadays. Though he's meant to be a crank (the movie couldn't be explicitly pro-war, of course), that's exactly how the script has rewritten the ending. And while the American lady evangelist Mrs. Melrose Ape is still presented as a grotesque charlatan (lighted from below Stockard Channing in a gaudy purple suit looks like Little Richard), the opening of her speech, "Just you look at yourselves," which in the book brings on such searching self-examination as "Darling, is my nose awful?", now leads to a tirade that reflects the movie's own attitude toward the superficially beau monde.
Article comments