Usually I resent physical mail delivery, since there is hardly ever anything I want in it and yet it never. stops. coming. except on Sundays, I guess. But I have in hand an advertisement for something I would not have thought existed: it turns out that the Washington Ballet is adapting The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway.
If it takes an English degree to think that's funny then my college education has done me some good. It's not merely that I am still uncultured enough to find ballet itself funny when juxtaposed with just about anything (although that is also undoubtedly true), but a Hemingway-ballet combination is the sort of thing one imagines exploding utterly, like matter and antimatter. Hemingway was such a strange animal in himself, a hyper-masculine and eminently taciturn writer; The Sun Also Rises itself is so bleak and uneventful that what I managed to read of it, in my two separate attempts, is largely a lacuna in my memory. To make The Sun Also Rises expressive, to make it flamboyant--I can hardly imagine that Hemingway would approve.
But then we live in an age of maximalism. The pendulum is at its far extreme from 1926, and if this generation is lost, most of us got that way without ever actually seeing the war that scattered us. Some of the best social commentary in the last 10 years has involved Batman. We don't do understatement anymore. So while Hemingway almost certainly wouldn't approve, maybe something as overblown as ballet would be able to expose the trenchant pathos that he was content to leave unsaid.
On the back of the flyer, the ad announces the ballet as "following on the success of The Great Gatsby." So apparently that was a ballet as well, but I missed it. (Not that I was going to go to Rises, mind you. I'm still in the process of coming to my main point. Thanks for staying with us.) However, I think that Gatsby is a more amenable story to bombastic presentation. Fitzgerald was more comfortable with stylistic flourishes, and excess is in the bones of the story.
In fact, it was the idea of just such a presentation that excited me back when I first got wind of Baz Luhrmann's movie version of The Great Gatsby. In a book that trades so heavily on prose and tone, any straight adaptation of the plot will fall flat--one of those increasingly self-evident truths that I think the brains of Hollywood are immune to. Linguistic flair should translate to the screen as cinematic flair: style and cinematography, of which Mr. Luhrmann at least has no shortage. At any rate, until a movie has come out, you can really only pin your hopes on mistakes that the production has apparently avoided, and I think it's a safe bet that Luhrmann's Gatsby will avoid the mistake of being dull.
I wish I did not have as many hopes for this movie as I do, but I have been pessimistic about the summer movie season so far. Recalling my intense distaste for Iron Man 2, I have few hopes for this year's vaunted sequels (the Iron Men and the Star Treks), precisely because I expect the expectation of money to have thoroughly crushed the life out of the spontaneous originals.
The irony is certainly not lost on me (is any?) that the movie I anticipate most this summer is based on a book that I am ambivalent towards. It read The Great Gatsby in high school, and then again when I was actually old enough to understand it, and I appreciated it but certainly didn't clamor for more. It is perhaps this lack of investment that allows me to hope at all. There is little threat of actual disappointment, as with The Hobbit. I have respect but not affection for the source material. The movie's failings should not gall me; its successes should entertain me. It's all gravy.
Except in spite of my protective disinterest, I find myself in a sort of informational purgatory. I want to read reviews, partly because they will help me determine what I'm doing with me weekend, and partly because I'm bored. Partly because while I'm not invested in the movie per se, I'm invested in my prediction that Baz Luhrmann is a good match for the source material, and I want to find out if people agree with me. All this in spite of knowing full well the aggregate reviews of this movie will be useless. 25% of viewers will hate Baz Luhrmann on principle. 25% of viewers will hate Leonardo DiCaprio on principle. 25% of viewers will want to flaunt their literacy by complaining about how the movie missed the spirit of the book. 25% of viewers will love it as empty audiovisual spectacle. 25% of viewers will be convinced that Gatsby and Daisy are a love story for the ages, no matter how shallow and awful they are supposed to be.
So we'll see. Or, anyway, I probably will.
I did a confused forehead wrinkle when I read that the ballet was doing "The Sun Also Rises" but I think I disagree with your analysis that something as stripped down as Hemingway doesn't mesh with something as "overblown" and "flamboyant" as ballet. There are certainly overblown spectacles, and I think these are more in the public consciousness - all the romantic ballets with lush music and gorgeous costumes and an emotional story. But there's also a lot of contemporary dance going on, and I could see the raw physical power of some modern dance working very well with Hemingway's spare, masculine style.
ReplyDelete