The Year in Books on Film

December 30, 2010

As 2010 draws to a close, we’re sliding in just under the wire with our year-end list of the best literary filmmaking. Rather than rank the best overall adaptations, we’ve highlighted specific feats of virtuoso performance, cinematography, score, voice-over narration, limb severing, etc. This way, we hope to provide an alternate perspective to view some of the year’s most celebrated and overlooked releases.

Though the overall quality of the year’s adaptations has been as varied as the films themselves, 2010 has been remarkable for the sheer number of movies with literary origins. This year the number of adapted films (38) was nearly doubled that of last year (22). The uptick is probably less an indication that Hollywood has gone bookish than it is part of an overall trend in Hollywood to favor recognizable titles with an established audience in some other medium — literary, video games, TV, and comics. Heck, even toys and board games seem to be preferable to braving the uncertainty of an original screenplay. That said, spec scripts may very well fall back into favor given that some of the year’s biggest critical and commercial hits — “Inception,” “Toy Story 3,” “Despicable Me,” “The Fighter,” “The Kids Are All Right” — were made from scratch by their filmmakers.

But as far as we’re concerned, the year’s real creative breakthroughs and most enduring acts of cinematic artistry came from source material that originated on somebody’s bookshelf. Without further ado, behold our take on the year’s most interesting literary spawn.

Trent Reznor’s score for “The Social Network“: The Nine Inch Nails frontman was the perfect choice to create the sonic accompaniment to this story — adapted from Ben Mezrich’s Accidental Billionaires – of a brilliant subversive with a finely tuned instinct for giving the people what they want. Reznor is famous not only for abandoning his record label, Interscope, to self-produce his albums, but also for standing up to The Man when he publicly criticized the label for price gouging his records and ripping off NIN’s fans. The music in “The Social Network” combines the heat of emotional urgency with hauntingly cool electronica. This is the best marriage of score to film since Johnny Greenwood’s masterful compositions for P.T. Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood.”

Noomi Rapace in The Millennium Trilogy: Rarely has any actress filled her silences with so much wounded-animal rage and ferocity. Her direct gaze is a loaded gun that becomes more menacing and powerful with each successive film. And yet the real miracle of her performance is in watching those titanium bullet eyes transform into those of a skittish doe in her most tender moments with Blomkvist.

Danny Boyle, director of “127 Hours“: When Boyle announced that he was following his Oscar-sweeping third-world fairytale, “Slumdog Millionaire,” with this adaptation of Aron Ralston’s harrowing tale of how he survived a hiking accident by sawing off his forearm with a dull blade, the general response was, ‘Good luck with that.’ It’s a tribute to Boyle’s explosive imagination and deep humanity that the resulting film is among the most dynamic and riveting cinematic experiences of the year. With a crucial assist from lead actor James Franco, Boyle conveys what it feels like to be inside the trapped hiker’s body and mind, jacking up the suspense as death inches closer as the water supply diminishes.

“Never Let Me Go“ production designer Mark Digby: The idea of finding the beauty in decay resides at the heart of this adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s bestselling novel about a trio of boarding schoolmates who discover that they’re clones who will soon die as their body parts are harvested for human transplants. Digby’s sets are full of broken and tattered objects, all of which are infused with a melancholy beauty, heightened by virtue of the fact that the characters inhabiting those rooms will never have the opportunity to experience the beauty of a full life lived.

“True Grit” cinematographer Roger Deakins: Deakins, the Coen Bros’ longtime director of photography, has always given each of their films its own distinctively beautiful look, perfectly aligned with the mood and genre of whatever story they’re telling. Deakins brings an elegant simplicity to his lighting and shot choices. Instead of drawing attention to his camerawork, he uses his lens as a tool to immerse the viewer into the slightly off worlds the Coens create. In “True Grit,” based on the Charles Portis novel, he conjures a sense of menace while counterbalancing that with benign and beautiful landscapes full of deep contrasts of light and shadow only achievable by avoiding the temptation and ease of digital photography and shooting with real film stock.

“The Ghost Writer” screenwriter-novelist, Robert Harris and writer-director Roman Polanski: There are startlingly few examples of novelists who have successfully adapted their own work — John Irving, Michael Crichton, and Richard Ford have all given it a shot with mixed results. But Harris, with Polanski’s help, managed to give new vibrant life to his crime novel, The Ghost, about a disgraced Tony Blair-like former British Prime Minister and what happens when the man he hires to write his memoir stumbles upon some shady episodes in the PM’s past. It’s rare to find such a compellingly complex thriller in print or on film, much less both.

Javier Bardem in “Eat, Pray Love“: At the center of this imperfect film’s orgiastic pursuit of pleasure was Javier Bardem, who inhabited his role as exotic foreign delicacy with such full-bodied relish he elevated his every scene.

Paul Giamatti in “Barney’s Version“: Mordecai Richler created a terminally vulgar, selfish man-child of a protagonist in the original novel, about the titular curmudgeon who stomps through life racking up many emotional casualties en-route to married bliss, divorce, and Alzheimers. Giamatti brings a fervid glee to the role, and his genuine affection for his cigar-huffing, impolitic, truth-teller character offers an experience akin to falling in love with a person you initially couldn’t stand.

Ondi Timoner’s “Cool It“: It’s a testament to Timoner’s deft storytelling that she can take an issue and figure as polarizing as climate change and Danish statistician, Bjorn Lomborg, that the film’s core audience ever made it into the theater at all. Lomborg has been accused of being a Global Warming denier by the Left, because of his controversial assertion that the threat of climate change has been overstated and the approach to correcting it misguided. Timoner’s film, however, uses a Greek chorus of academics and scientists to lay out the arguments against Lomborg and then to offer a more nuanced view of the areas in which the he makes very compelling points.

Thomas Haden Church in “Easy A“: The award for year’s most overlooked and underestimated adaptation might go to this piquant high school comedy about a sassy teen who suffers socially once word gets out that she’s no longer a virgin. Loosely based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the film is packed with unexpected delights. But none are more exhilaratingly indelible as Church’s high school English teacher, who delivers a spectacular rap rendition of his analysis of Hawthorne’s novel.

Tags: 127 Hours, Barney's Version, best of 2010, Bjorn Lomborg, Cool It, Easy A, Eat, Javier Bardem, Love, Millennium Trilogy, Never Let Me Go, Noomi Rapace, Paul Giamatti, Pray, Robert Harris, Roman Polanski, Stieg Larsson, The Coen Bros, The Ghost Writer, The Scarlet Letter, The Social Network, Thomas Haden Church, True Grit, year end list