{"id":9438,"date":"2018-05-30T00:01:55","date_gmt":"2018-05-30T04:01:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=9438"},"modified":"2019-01-12T14:46:48","modified_gmt":"2019-01-12T19:46:48","slug":"the-barely-fictionalized-movie-versions-of-philip-roth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/the-barely-fictionalized-movie-versions-of-philip-roth\/","title":{"rendered":"The Barely Fictionalized Movie Versions of Philip Roth"},"content":{"rendered":"

This month saw the passing of Philip Roth, as important \u2014 and no less controversial \u2014 a figure to the field of literature as Ty Cobb was to baseball, or Pablo Picasso was to painting. Considered by many to rank among the greatest American novelists of all time, Roth also accumulated a large share of detractors throughout his 51-year career, who often accused him of purveying, rather than simply portraying, many of the themes his writing was synonymous with \u2014 namely misogyny and egomania. <\/span><\/p>\n

As a result, Roth \u2014 both the man and the idea \u2014 became impossible to ignore, not only for readers of fiction, but also filmmakers. Beginning with the 1969 adaptation of his National Book Award-winning debut Goodbye, Columbus<\/i>, Roth and his work have seen a good amount of onscreen representation, not only by way of other adaptations of his work, but also \u2014 and more interestingly \u2014 in fictionalized versions of himself.<\/span><\/p>\n

There have been nine adaptations of Roth\u2019s work overall, only two of which \u2014 Goodbye, Columbus<\/i> and its dark double, the college-set drama Indignation <\/i>(2016) <\/i>\u2014 do an adequate job of capturing the spirit of their respective source material.<\/span><\/p>\n

The rest of the these films range from the merely forgettable \u2014 including 2003\u2019s The Human Stain<\/i> (which, as Roth himself put it<\/span><\/a>, \u201chad a very impressive cast of actors and a horrendously bad script\u2026\u201d); 2008\u2019s Elegy<\/i> (per Roth: \u201cI believe that was written by the same screenwriter who wrote The Human Stain, s<\/i>o he\u2019s two-for-two\u201d), and 2014\u2019s The Humbling<\/i> \u2014 to the truly ghastly, such as 1972\u2019s Portnoy\u2019s Complaint<\/i> (Roth again: \u201cFrom the best I could tell it was a movie about shouting\u2026\u201d) and the 2016 desecration of his Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral<\/i>. <\/span><\/p>\n

Better suited to the task of capturing what makes Roth\u2019s work so special are two films that seek to explore, if not the man himself, then at least the idea of him.<\/span><\/p>\n

The first and most controversial of these is Woody Allen\u2019s 1997 comedy Deconstructing Harry<\/i>. It\u2019s become increasingly difficult to discuss any aspect of Allen\u2019s work or life without also delving into the allegations of abuse made against him \u2014 a difficulty that is increased ten-fold when considering Deconstructing Harry.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

The film \u2014 which uses the memory-hopping structure of Ingmar Bergman\u2019s Wild Strawberries<\/i> to trace the history of Harry Block (Allen), a lonely, miserly novelist suffering from writer\u2019s block (get it?) \u2014 seems as much an attempt on Allen\u2019s behalf to explain his well-known shortcomings or public humiliations as it is an examination of the Roth persona. Whether or not this was intentional, it was unavoidable, as there are few artists as analogous to one another as Roth and Allen.<\/span><\/p>\n

Only three years apart in age, both men rose to fame during the same period and would go on to serve as poster boys for libidinous, nebbish intellectuals of the Jewish variety (along the way earning the ire of many of their fellow Jews, who thought they were making the rest of them look bad). The best-known work from the first halves of their respective careers \u2014 Roth\u2019s Portnoy\u2019s Complaint<\/i> (1969) and Allen\u2019s Annie Hall<\/i> (1977) \u2014 were groundbreaking comic masterpieces that mined their heroes\u2019 neurosis and fetishes by way of psychoanalysis and meta-narrative trickery (Roth, who got there first, would always harbor a grudge against Allen, who he felt ripped him off). <\/span><\/p>\n

Both men also underwent ugly public breakups at roughly the same time, and each had tell-all books written about them by their former partners. To make matters even more screwy, each would be linked with the other\u2019s partner in one capacity or another \u2014 Allen cast Roth\u2019s ex-wife, Claire Bloom, in his film Crimes & Misdemeanors <\/i>(1989), while Roth was rumored to have dated Mia Farrow shortly after her break-up with Allen (beyond whatever romantic entanglement the two shared, Roth and Farrow remained good friends for the rest of Roth\u2019s life).<\/span><\/p>\n

In Deconstructing Harry, <\/i>all of this history and notoriety is used to both hilarious and cringeworthy effect. While Allen\u2019s film is clearly sympathetic to its anti-hero, one senses that Allen is also gleefully sticking it to Roth. This is most obvious in Allen\u2019s casting of the actor Richard Benjamin \u2014 who starred in the adaptations of Goodbye, Columbus<\/i> and Portnoy\u2019s Complaint<\/i> \u2014 as Block\u2019s fictional alter ego.<\/span><\/p>\n

Even with a gentle ending that convincingly makes a case for the solace of art, Deconstructing Harry<\/i> remains one of Allen\u2019s more mean-spirited films. That being said, it comes off as nothing short of gentle when compared to Alex Ross Perry\u2019s Listen Up, Philip <\/i>(2014).<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Listen Up, Philip <\/i>is a brutally acerbic ensemble piece that traces several intersecting lives within the New York literary scene. At the center of the film is Philip Lewis Friedman (Jason Schwartzman), a young author awaiting the publication of his second novel, who suddenly finds himself under the tutelage of his idol, the esteemed writer Ike Zimmerman (Jonathan Pryce). Both men being massive narcissists who wear their misanthropy as badges of honor, the friendship that blossoms between the two is so outwardly toxic that it thoroughly and irrevocably isolates them from every single other person in their lives.<\/span><\/p>\n

While the hermetic Zimmerman is clearly meant to recall Roth (who, like his fictional doppelg\u00e4nger, forsook New York City for the quiet of the country), Philip shares more than just a first name with him \u2014 resembling as much in his single-minded commitment to his craft the young protagonists of Roth\u2019s fiction as Zimmerman does the older examples throughout his later work (where, like here, they often end up regretting their self-imposed exiles). <\/span><\/p>\n

Perry\u2019s film doubles down on its references by way of its wonderfully evocative art design. A montage of Zimmerman\u2019s novels (replete with dead-on titles such as Women & Madness<\/i>, Bad Eating<\/i>, and Audit<\/i>) perfectly capture the outward aesthetic qualities of Roth\u2019s novels over the decades. Pryce, meanwhile, does a much better job than Allen (who, as in all of his films, is essentially playing himself) in capturing the crabby, punchy, suffer-no-fools attitude that Roth was known to exhibit in interviews and public appearances.<\/span><\/p>\n

Listen Up, Philip<\/i> is not as interested in excoriating or explaining Roth\u2019s public persona as it is using it as a foundation to examine the collateral damage that can be wrought by those who buy into it. The film abruptly switches its narrative point-of-view halfway through to focus on the women in Philip and Zimmerman\u2019s orbit \u2014 their partners, their mistresses, their daughters \u2014 all of whom have their own lives upended simply by investing emotional support in the type of narcissists incapable of giving it back. Much has been made (and not always fairly) of Roth\u2019s unwillingness, or even inability, to write well-rounded women, and this aspect of the film is clearly Perry\u2019s way of commenting on this, while also expanding his own story\u2019s scope.<\/span><\/p>\n

Where the ending of Deconstructing Harry<\/i> validates its Roth-like protagonist\u2019s choices by siding with his all-encompassing devotion to writing (\u201cYou saved my life\u201d, he says to his menagerie of imaginary characters during the film\u2019s conclusion), Listen Up, Philip<\/i> utterly eviscerates this same notion, the film\u2019s final line being one of the more haunting in recent memory. In doing so, it solidifies itself as the truer of the two, at least in comparison to Roth, who never let his characters off easy, no matter how much they resembled him. <\/span><\/p>\n

Separate from however much they succeed on their own merits, neither film serves as a very fair representation of Roth. They both focus exclusively on the controversial and problematic aspects of the Roth persona. While this is certainly fair game considering how much gold Roth himself mined from that territory, they represented only a portion of what made Roth so special. <\/span><\/p>\n

His devotion to his craft was not some vain and destructive pursuit, but rather a serious and inspirational one. For as transgressive as his work often was, it also contained a strong moral center. And for as fraught as many of his relationships were known to be, he was also considered a kind, engaging, funny, and loyal friend (Zadie Smith\u2019s remembrance<\/span><\/a> is just one of several loving tributes published over the past few days by those who knew him personally).<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, it doesn\u2019t really matter how fair or even accurate films about Roth are. They were never going to get him right, because any attempt to do so would have proven impossible in the end. As Roth himself wrote in American Pastoral<\/i>:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It\u2019s getting them wrong that\u2019s living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong again. That\u2019s how we know we\u2019re alive: we\u2019re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that \u2014 well, lucky you.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
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This month saw the passing of Philip Roth, as important \u2014 and no less controversial \u2014 a figure to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":506,"featured_media":9439,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,1399],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/506"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9438\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}