Midnight’s Children, the film adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s prize-winning novel of the same name, premiered in Ottawa this week. The story chronicles the lives of one family from India’s independence in 1947 until the 1980s.
The film, adapted for the screen by Indian-Canadian director Deepa Mehta, premiered in Ottawa as part of the Ottawa International Writer’s Festival. Mehta attended the premier and took part in a Q&A about the film.
Tickets for the movie’s Ottawa premiere sold out so quickly that the festival had to add an earlier screening so that more people could see the film.
The premiere’s success owes much to the wide appeal of Rushdie’s novel, which is generally considered his best work.
But Rushdie’s fans’ motives might not be entirely magnanimous. Translating a book to film is a tricky craft and there’s a certain schadenfreude in seeing a beloved book mishandled by Hollywood.
Take, for example, the Harry Potter films. The acting in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is so wooden and the narrative so condensed that the movie is almost unwatchable. The movie’s greatest delight is as a vehicle for derision.
But Mehta is no Chris Columbus. Her Fire, Earth and Water trilogy was nominated for two Academy Awards and she has proven herself a superb filmmaker with a lush visual style.
Then there’s Rushdie, who not only gave her adaptation his blessing, but also helped her write the screenplay.
Midnight’s Children, arguably his best novel, is a classic example of magical realism and also a classic example of Rushdie’s enigmatic, witty and erudite prose.
Without his voice, the film would be a pale reflection of his richly textured world.
Rushdie may be able to infuse the screenplay for Midnight’s Children with his characteristic wit. But it’s a fine line between faithfulness to an author’s vision and preciousness with the text.
It seems sacrilegious to compare J.K. Rowling’s fantasy series to Rushdie’s Nobel-Prize winning oeuvre but the analogy is not entirely meaningless.
Rowling was heavily involved with the film adaptations, much like Rushdie’s involvement with Midnight’s Children.While the Harry Potter films were faithful to the minutiae of Rowling’s universe, they failed to capture the magic (pun intended) of reading her series.
The biggest problem with adapting a book to film is that no matter how closely a film captures the author’s intentions, it very rarely captures the book’s multitude of meanings for its many readers.
Reading is a messy and intensely personal act.
I reread passages over and over; I skip others; I flip back and forth between pages. No matter how tight the narrative, I unravel it and reconstruct it at will. The joy of reading is not submitting myself to an author’s vision but recreating it for myself.
Film watching, on the other hand, is almost always a communal and a much more passive act. We sit in a theatre with other people, held captive by the flickering screen.
We may talk about the movie over coffee afterwards but by then the images may already be fading from our minds. It involves more recall than rewrite.
For Mehta and Rushdie, the auteurs behind the film Midnight’s Children, narrative control might be a blessing. But for readers of Rushdie’s work, who’ve spent days, months and years building and destroying the novel’s world in their minds, relinquishing this power will always come at a price.