Introduction
If you've read my columns on TV
or film over the years you know that when I review a TV show or a film based on
a novel I go out of my way not to read the book first because I want to
give the show or film a fair shake. Many times after the fact I will argue why
the TV show or film is an improvement or the adaptation (Little Fires
Everywhere) or why you can read both and enjoy them equally (Apples
Never Fall, the Will Trent novels.)
This series will be the other
side of the coin: in which I take a hard look at film or TV adaptations of a
novel I've read (either before or after the fact) and that I think the writers
did a disservice to the source material. While I will allow a certain amount of
creative license there are occasions when I believe the adaptor made choices
that weakened the structure of the original work for reasons that are
inexplicable to me because they would have led to a more interesting story.
In this case these will be
recommendations for the book. I will do my best to avoid spoilers but in some
cases it may be unavoidable.
Every
Secret Thing by Laura Lippman
Last year while channel chasing
through HBO I found myself drawn to an intriguing mystery called Every
Secret Thing. The film tells the story of two girls named Ronnie and Alice
who at the age of eleven were accused of killing a baby and sentenced to
juvenile. Seven years later after they are released, another baby that
resembles the one that was taken disappears and the detective who investigated
the original case starts to follow them to find a connection.
The film had a good pedigree.
Dakota Fanning played Ronnie and Danielle MacDonald played the overweight
Alice. Elizabeth Banks, in a rare serious role, played the detective on the
original case and Diane Lane played Helen, Alice's mother who had a critical
role in much of what happened. The director was Amy Berg and Nicole Holofcener,
a brilliant screenwriter and director is associated with the screenplay. But
there just seemed something about that was off.
When I learned that Laura Lippman
had written the original novel I immediately sought it out. By this time I was
already a fan of Lippman's standalone work and was devouring her Tess Monoghan
novels at a quick streak. I found the original novel extraordinarily dark,
riveting and cold – and realized immediately that Berg and Holofcener, two creative
forces who rarely step wrong had done the source material a spectacular
disservice.
To be clear the basic structure
of the plot is the same: the novel does involve the investigation into two
teenagers who, days after they have been released from juvie become the targets
of the investigation into the abduction of a teenage girl. The problem is, Berg
and Holofcener choose to focus the film version far more on the relationship of
the two girls as children and then adults and in relationship to the murder. In
Lippman's novel, the two girls are by far the least interesting characters:
barely capable of thinking, not incredibly able to make coherent thoughts and
there is no focus on the past. Indeed, much of the power of Lippman's novel is
how it argues that then and now the two girls had little role in their own
destinies but even if they had, they wouldn't be able to much with it.
Considering how much of
Holofcener and Berg's work involves women, its very striking that they chose to
adapt a story that is focused entirely on female characters and then either
omit or minimize to near irrelevance three women who are by the far the most
important to the story and ignore the more important societal issues that
involve it. Considering that this would have not only led to a deeper film but
also dealt with more fascinating issues – racism, sexism, and class divide –
its disappointing both woman took such a tame and traditional approach to the
narrative.
Most shocking is how they
essentially choose to make Helen and Alice Manning appear to be criminal
masterminds in the eyes of Detective Porter. In a scene near the end of the
novel she actually says about Alice:
In the big picture, she's an
amateur. I've been in interview rooms with truly scary characters. Alice
Manning wasn't one of them."
And she thinks less of Helen who
is also pushed up in a similar fashion: Asked how she goes on after everything
she set in motion:
"She goes on because she
doesn't see it that way. Because she truly believes what she did was always
well intentioned. Helen Manning is a woman inclined to always think well of
herself."
This hardly fits with the end of
the film when Porter and her partner look at the Mannings speaking to the TV
(in a scene that never plays out in the original book) as if they are the worst
people they've encountered in all their years of investigating murders. In the
novel Alice seems spectacularly stupid and inept and Helen, while somewhat
selfish, recognizes how dangerous her daughter is and doesn't bother to stand
by her after a point.
In a way the decision to case
Ronnie with Dakota Fanning does Fanning a disservice. Fanning was becoming more
and more famous at the time and the writers seem to be determined to built her
character up more at the expense of so many others. There's a logic to this, of
all the characters in the book Ronnie is pictured as the greatest monster of
them all when in fact she's more of a victim of circumstance than Alice is, and
in the original novel Alice has managed to get away relatively clean with what
she's done. Ronnie's fate, which I will not reveal here, is tragic and in a
sense inevitable.
The problem is that in the
original novel Ronnie and Alice are even bigger victims than they think and so
much of the impetus of the action is put in play by a character who has next to
no screentime in the film. And it is that decision that I believe truly
undercuts the screen adaptation of Every Secret Thing and was in large
part a reason why the film was so tepidly received by critics and audiences.
The film version is a conventional story. Lippman's novel is anything but.
Stepping back a bit in my review
of Laura Lippman's Prom Mom I mentioned that I was astonished despite
her great credentials as a writers how few adaptations of Lippman's works there
had been for film or television. Having read quite a bit more of Lippman's
novels after the last six months I have a theory as to why. Though her Tess
Monoghan novels and almost every standalone she's written have female
protagonists and the female characters are more dominant presences then the
male ones they are also not particularly different from the male protagonists
in the novels of say Dennis Lehane or Richard Price. By that I mean they are
deeply flawed, frequently judgmental of others and perhaps most tellingly treat
other women as bad as men treat female characters in other novels.
Tess Monoghan is as guilty of being led by the
good looks of random men even if sometimes those men are married or if she's in
another relationship. The women in Tess's life who she thinks are friends and
even her family treat her very badly and she feels no remorse in doing the
same. This is true of so many of the female characters in the standalones as
well, particularly the neo-noirs she writes but just as often more conventional
books. And perhaps most daringly Lippman argues that gender and race are not
the most important divides as class is. In many of her books she argues that it
is wealth and status that make a person a contemptuous bigot and that can apply
whether you are a woman or African-American. Lippman would not hold to the idea
that if women ruled the world it would be a paradise and Every Secret Thing written
in 2003 is her first standalone where that argument is central to the plot.
We are never allowed to forget
that Cynthia Barnes is the victim of the worst thing that can ever happen to a
mother so it may be Lippman's greatest trick as a writer that at no point in
the novel does Barnes ever come across as a sympathetic character. More
striking by the time the novel comes to its end, the reader has every reason to
fear for the child currently being raised by Cynthia (she's essentially a
replacement for Olivia) because it's clear she's not only being raised in a
house without love but that her mother may not be capable of showing it to her
when she gets older.
Cynthia Barnes is the daughter of
a prominent African-American judge and therefore comes from a position of power
and wealth that is rare for African-Americans to enjoy in Baltimore. Yet
Lippman is, if anything, far more of a bigot than so many of the white people
in Maryland: when Brittany Little is abduced Cynthia goes out of her way to
actually say that it might be better off for the daughter to be taken then
raised by this woman. She thinks that she is better than everyone around her
and never remotely thinks that she's luckier than most people of her race or
gender. And in case we are given to think the trauma shaped her, Lippman makes
it very clear she had those positions well before her infant daughter was
taken.
Late in the novel you get the
feeling that Cynthia's bitterness isn't so much at her daughter's abduction or
murder but because "she was guilty of wanting to live an enviable life'.
She had a key position working for the mayor (who in earlier chapters she
clearly thinks she's better than) and her husband was the most successful black
plaintiff's attorney in town. She 'allowed the city magazine to run photographs
of her home' – by that time it's clear she wanted to make it clear to the city of
their opinion of her. She let it be known that she was one of those women who
was 'juggling, that she had returned to her job at the mayor after a mere three
months off – and gotten her figure back in a remarkable six months off'."
The magazine is published two months after Olivia is abducted and killed but
it's clear Cynthia is angrier that her perfect life was disturbed even more
than the death of her infant.
Cynthia Barnes believes she is
superior to the world, including her husband at the time. She went into work
because she didn't think the mayor could be trusted and she left him with a
baby-sitter she picked because based on her appearance, she thinks it impossible
she would be 'distracted by a boy'. Cynthia judges everyone on appearances and
finds all of them inferior to her. Lippman implies that in the normal course of
events Olivia would have been raised by babysitters and nannies, attended the
best schools and the best colleges and that her family would have only used her
for social events rather than personally raised her.
And even when her daughter is
murdered she refuses to grieve. She is actually ordered to leave a victim's
group when it becomes clear she feels that she has nothing in common with
people who lost children the same way. The implication is that Cynthia isn't
mourning her daughter but is furious that her perfect world was ruined by white
trash.
Essentially she uses her family's
power and influence to make sure that two eleven year old girls essentially get
the harshest punishment under the law. We later learn that her father threatened
that if this didn't happen they were planning to change the rules so that
juvenile offenders were tried in adult court. When she learns that Alice and
Ronnie have been released, she goes out of her way to make sure that they are punished
for what they did.
The moment Brittany Little is
abducted, she begins to start pulling strings: she demands to talk to the
detective in charge, goes out of her way to visit the victim, makes calls to a
local reporter (also absent from the book) all in order to arrange a lynch mob for
the two women in the court of public opinion. That Brittany Little was taken by
one of the girls is almost incidental (here the book and movie are identical)
and even knowing this I wondered if Cynthia had arranged for the abduction to
happen. It's clear by the novel's end she's been pulling strings longer than that,
so it doesn't seem impossible.
If the writers had the courage to
take a more literal adaptation of the book, this would have been a darker and
more powerful film. I can't help but wonder if Shonda Rhimes ever read this
novel because Cynthia Little is very much a precursor of the protagonists in
Shondaland we'd meet a decade later. Olivia Pope and Annalyse Keating are not
that far removed from the kind of dark, manipulative personality that Cynthia
Barnes is in this novel. (Hmmm. Olivia Pope, Olivia Barnes…nah it has to be a
coincidence.) And considering that this film came out in 2014 right around the
time that Scandal and How To Get Away With Murder were shaking up
Thursdays on ABC, this actually seems like the kind of story Rhimes could have
adapted brilliantly.
And the novel is full of so many
interesting women that the film didn't bother to have. There's Sharon, Alice's
original attorney who completely believes in the innocence of her client and is
powered by liberal guilt more than guile in going forward. There's Mira, a
reporter at the Baltimore Beacon Light, who is stuck in the worst job at the
paper because of the failures of her editor (humorously known as Nostrildamus)
and ends up prone to the manipulation of Cynthia in the search of a good story.
There's the brief cameo of Rosario Bustamante, the leader of the most influential
law firm in Baltimore who Sharon sells her soul to in order to get Ronnie the
best deal possible and who seems to go through life with a permanent buzz on.
Even Nancy Porter is much
different in the original novel; portly, arrogant and not above using harassment
to make a statement in the press and being shocked when it backfires on her. By
the end of the book she's actually figured out Cynthia is pulling the strings
behind everything and the two of them meet at her daughter's grave. Cynthia thinks
the meeting is beneath her and that Detective Porter doesn't know anything.
However when she makes her final statements about the Mannings, it's clear to
the reader (though not necessarily to Cynthia) that she knows exactly the role
she played it in. Unlike Cynthia she is capable of seeing the bigger picture
and can move on in a way it's not clear Olivia is capable of.
Every Secret Thing the novel is a far more dark and
haunting look into the human soul than the film we got even attempts at. One
almost wonders if there's a certain liberal guilt by the writers of the novel:
that they found it easier to write a story where two poor white women are
capable of committing a crime and manipulating the media than a wealthy
African-American one who is a 'scary character' in a way Alice and Helen
Manning aren't. We may not have been ready in 2014 – or even now - to have a story like that told on the big
screen where two girls are responsible for the kidnapping and murder of a baby
are small fish compared to the real life monsters above them.
And that may be the real reason
that Every Secret Thing died as quickly as it did at the box office and
among critics. The film wants to try to be a dark story but at the end of the
day is simply too traditional. When the detectives look at the Mannings at the
end of the movie, they see the worst aspects of humanity and it leaves them
cynical. When Detective Porter meets with Cynthia Barnes at the end of the book
she's looking at someone we have every reason to think is worse than the Mannings
– but who even knowing what she does, has a far more interesting and complex
attitude that will leave the reader far more impressed.
No comments:
Post a Comment