Why We Travel: 8 Great Movies About Americans Abroad
July 15, 2014 · from the Word & Film archive
Summer travel season is upon us, so we assembled the essential syllabus of Americans going elsewhere and elsewhere winning. Eight favorites, books included where the movies borrowed them:
1. The Talented Mr. Ripley — Highsmith's warning that the trip changes you into exactly who you pretend to be. 2. Before Sunrise — one night in Vienna, no luggage. 3. Lost in Translation — jet lag as a spiritual state. 4. The Sheltering Sky — Paul Bowles' desert erasing a marriage; Bertolucci filming the void.
5. Roman Holiday — the fantasy in its purest form, plus Vespas. 6. Midnight in Paris — literary tourism as time travel. 7. Eat Pray Love — the memoir-industrial complex at maximum wattage. 8. A Walk in the Woods — cheating slightly, since Bryson never leaves America; but the Appalachian Trail is its own foreign country, and Redford's adaptation arrives next year.
The common thread: travel in these stories is never geography, it's exposure — remove the routines and see what's structural. Bryson's trail memoir, the gentlest of the lot, is cataloged here.
