PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*
In an essay related to Ray Bradbury's classic FAHRENHEIT 451, I called attention to this passage, the closest the author comes to voicing an aesthetics of good and bad literature:
The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.
I then pointed out that although 451 is replete with many examples of mediocre writing-- mostly televisual in nature-- the reader never knows what sort of literature Bradbury would have found vile enough for this usually mild-mannered author to resort to the rape metaphor. But I like to think he might have considered HBO's adaptation of his novel, directed and co-written by Ramin Bahrani. to belong to the "worse than mediocre" category.
There are two ways to *potentially* render good adaptations of established works, though neither method guarantees success.
The first to attempt to make the adaptation as faithful as possible to the original. There are many such adaptations, ranging from the excellent to the serviceable, and sometimes the approach is problematic given the difficulties of the work-- one example being Ray Bradbury's dubious cinematic adaptation of Melville's gargantuan MOBY DICK.
The second method is to make the adaptation partly unfaithful because the adaptor has different priorities than the original artist, but he still produces key aspects of the source work even if his overall theme is different, as was the case with the 1982 BLADE RUNNER with respect to the Philip K Dick novel.
Francois Truffaut's FAHRENHEIT 451 is another example of a divergent adaptation that transcends its infidelity, and I suppose Ramin Bahrani may have had some notion of doing the same. What Bahrani and HBO produced, though, was a lame travesty of 451, quite possibly motivated by a desire to capitalize on the author's name.
Trufant's rendering might not have mirrored Bradbury's passion for the written word, but at least the French director had some notion of capturing the dissonance of a world where firemen burned books. Bahrani's only goal was to make a dull anti-totalitarian drama, in which the burning of books played a minor role.
There's also a strong indication that Bahrani sought to change the story into one of modern race-conflict into a future setting. Not only is rebellious fireman Guy Montag played by Black actor Michael B. Jordan, he's given a White opponent in the character of Captain Beatty, played by Michael Shannon.
In the book, though Captain Beatty is Montag's pre-eminent opponent, representing the repressive government of book-burners, he's secondary to the female influences on Montag's consciousness: wife Millie, who's become totally brainwashed by the anti-book culture, and Montag's neighbor Clarisse, the elfin young girl who opens Montag's mind to new experiences. In the HBO version, Millie is replaced by a home computer, and Clarisse becomes, of all things, a police informant (!)
In compensation, Bahrani builds up the relationship of Beatty and Montag into that of mentor and student, even surrogate father-and-son. Montag's father was a fireman too, implicitly killed by Beatty so that he could become Montag's "new daddy"-- though the symbolism is hurt by the fact that in 2018 Jordan had just passed thirty, making him a peculiar choice for the "son with a bad dad" trope. Jordan and Shannon fire up their weak characters with considerable passion, but they can't make these lousy characters seem real. Shannon, by the way, gets to play a Spike Lee White Guy by the way Beatty flagrantly uses the Big Evil Forbidden Word.
The rebels against the government, called "Eels" for some reason, aren't a bunch of pacifists memorizing books, so Bahrani transforms them into dime-a-dozen revolutionaries. I suppose there are worse adaptations than this one, but it's certainly near the bottom of the barrel.