Old Motors

[John Crowley's LJ (RSS Feed)]

Speaking (still) of novels-into-movies, I've come to understand an effect of certain movies -- mostly British, mostly high-tone -- made from older novels. The greatest part of the pleasure of watching, say, a Jane Austen movie, or Brideshead Revisited, or Les Liaisons Dangereuses, or any Forster novel or James novel in film, is watching the clothes and the scenery, the automobiles, the carriages, the houses and gardens. And yet these things are almost invisible in the novels themselves, particularly Austen's. There is a lavish generosity about the films that's gratifying, they feed nostalgia, but all those are effects the novels never strive for. In a new or original movie set in the past, like Gosford Park or LA Confidential or There Will Be Blood (based but only just barely on a novel) this effect is of course part of the original impulse of the film, so you can't say it's a distraction or a distortion. And it's not a distortion in films based on books where the scenery and the clothes and the stuff were important parts of the pleasure or effect of the book (The House of Mirth, Last of the Mohicans). But it's what makes Clueless in some sense a more true Austen film than the others. Barry Lyndon makes it the subject of the film, which is its achievement.

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