DVD Notes:
“A Room With a View”
The initial problem facing any filmmaker wishing to adapt a novel
for the screen is the problem of plot. Specifically, how much stays in, how
much is thrown out, and how much can be added without looking unbearably
arrogant? Many filmmakers have trouble with length: the Harry Potter
books and novels of Dickens are far too long for direct transcription into a
screenplay, and much decisive, and often painful, snipping away has to be done.
What seems to work with a somewhat higher rate of success is adapting a
shorter book, giving filmmakers room to expand and compound, rather than
condense and simplify. Wes Anderson provides an ideal example with his Fantastic
Mr Fox, taken from the tiny children’s book by Roald Dahl, as do David
Fincher and Eric Roth with their grand adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short
story The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
In their remarkably successful film version of E.M. Forster’s novel A
Room With a View, which was released 30 years ago and has never really
waned in popularity, the out director James Ivory, his long-term romantic and production partner producer Ismail Merchant, and
writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala take a path straight down the middle. They took a
novel neither longer nor shorter than was required, and performed a kind of
fundamentalist translation from page to screen. Forster begins, for
example, Chapter 2 thus:
“It was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to
open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look
clean though they are not, with a painted ceiling whereon pink griffins and
blue amorini sport in a forest of yellow violins and bassoons. It was pleasant,
too, to fling wide the windows, pinching the fingers in unfamiliar fastenings,
to lean out into sunshine with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches
opposite, and, close below, the Arno , gurgling
against the embankment of the road.”
In the corresponding scene in the film, Ivory supplies a shot of
Helena Bonham Carter as Lucy Honeychurch (the novel and film’s heroine) lying
on her back in her hotel room’s bed, having just woken up, looking about the
somewhat empty room. The look on Bonham Carter’s face suggests casual
concentration, as if she is both reciting the passage to herself and
remembering to show it in her facial expressions for the camera. She gets up and opens the
windows wide, looks out upon the sunlit city across the Arno ,
which is conscientiously included in the shot, upon the churches and, beyond
them, the green hills.
The entire film is written and shot with that kind of devotional
loyalty to the novel. Even the chapter headings are reproduced at the
beginnings of scenes, with title cards appearing bearing text like “The
Reverend Arthur Beebe, the Reverend Cuthbert Eager, Mr Emerson, Mr George
Emerson, Miss Eleanor Lavish, Miss Charlotte Bartlett and Miss Lucy Honeychurch
Drive Out in Carriages to See a View; Italians Drive Them”. The reason for it,
I should think, is that Jhabvala, herself a celebrated novelist, knew very well
what Forster was trying to achieve throughout, and out of respect for
a colleague and his labours, she worked to replicate his efforts in the film’s
screenplay. The result is that A Room With a View plays like a mere
enactment, simply an audiovisual illustration of Forster’s novel with no
imaginative feats or original images of its own.