Double-Takes: Intersections between Canadian Literature and Film

Why They Cannot Get It Right: A Reader’s Notes about Richler on Screen

Natalia Vesselova 219 Why They Cannot Get It Right: A Reader’s Notes about Richler on Screen Natalia Vesselova This paper appeared as a result of reading a film review in which Joe Wiesen­ feld, a scriptwriter for the adaptation of Mordecai Richler’s St. Urbain’s Horseman , remarked upon completing the project: “For the sake of the country, we wanted to get this right, and I think we have” (qtd. in Hays n. pag.). This ambitious statement leaves a viewer of the film who happened to have read Richler’s novel perplexed. On the one hand, the recent CBC production is a well-made and enjoyable mini TV series; on the other hand, it has little to do with Richler’s intense irony, complexity and symbolism. It is well known that Richler himself, being an experienced scriptwriter, had gone through numerous drafts before finally giving up on writing a screenplay for an adaptation of his own novel. In light of this fact, a question arises: Is St. Urbain’s Horseman adaptable at all? Or other novels by the same author, for that matter? Wiesenfeld claims that “what makes adapting Richler difficult generally is people are so intimidated by the source material” (qtd. in Hays n. pag.). This explanation is a good try, but it hardly stands any criticism, since screen versions of books much more revered than Richler’s have been universally made, Leo Tolstoy’s iconic epic War and Peace, filmed more than once, being an obvious example. In his commentary on St. Urbain’s Horseman for the Globe and Mail, film critic Matthew Hays admits that the real difficulty lies elsewhere: “[K]ey to the book, of course, is Richler’s acerbic wit, something the producers felt was getting lost in translation. As well, much of the book’s perspective is internal to its protagonist. And then there’s the fact that the novel stretches over three decades and three cities” (n. pag.). While the last bit of this pronouncement hardly explains any problems with adapting a novel (have we not seen successful film epics where the action takes place across time and space?), the questions of tone and perspective are much more important. As a matter of fact, they could be crucial for understanding why, as many critics wonder, there is not more Richler on screen. Richler on Screen 220 The screen versions of Mordecai Richler’s works include several films, such as The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), Joshua Then and Now (1985), a ten-minute animated piece The Street (1976), two children’s films based on Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang (1978 and 1999) and the three-hour CBC production of St. Urbain’s Horseman (2007). They all received positive critical response, but none of them stands up to the literary source or can be considered a cinematic masterpiece. Even the celebrated Duddy Kravitz, commercially successful, glorified by Canadian critics and awarded several prizes, including the highly prestigious Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival (1974), gives a keen reader of Richler a feeling of being bamboozled. St. Urbain’s Horseman, despite its pertinent casting and a vibrant script, is yet another disenchantment, and the same applies to Joshua Then and Now. There is no doubt that all these films treat Richler’s novels tactfully and try to stay as close to the original as possible (in the case of Duddy Kravitz, as well as Joshua Then and Now, Richler himself participated in the scriptwriting and approved almost every detail). The problem is that the material they tackle resists the very idea of being filmed. It is a generally admitted fact that cinema and literature are two completely different languages of artistic expression, and the process of filming a literary work is essentially that of translation. Translation theory suggests (and practice proves) that certain works can be rendered into another language more accurately and with less damage to the meaning than others; prose translates far better than poetry; narratives centred upon action translate far better than those focusing on style and language. The same principle is applicable to novels and their cinematic versions: just as poetry, according to Robert Frost, “is what gets lost in translation,” the art of words is what cannot be screened. While, for example, nineteenth-century “critical realist” fiction with its wellrounded plots provides reliable material for numerous films, literary works preoccupied with subtler things than a story, and portraying characters using means other than descriptions, lose...