Just as the first winds of autumn blow through town, when our psyches rediscover an old, exhilarating melancholy, the immortals begin gathering up the road in Sun Valley. Every writer I know dreams of being a shaman of the heart, a troubadour, a tour guide to the Great Mysteries. But only a precious few get to trade in that most pristine and inestimable currency of our time: literary fame. Each year I stalk the tents at the Sun Valley Writers' Conference in the hope of sharing in the glory. Never am I so far from my dreams as when I am standing right next to them.
This year I listened to Brandon Stoddard, former chief of ABC, explain with precision why the Film "Atonement," adapted from Ian McEwan's novel of the same title, didn't win an Oscar, and failed to achieve word-of-mouth critical acclaim. His analysis of how the film faltered and the script fell out of proper sequence, becoming ... well, inconsequential, was brilliant. It was also an example of how the entertainment industry can sometimes devour itself through self-referential analysis, missing the point of a good story. To begin with, who cares about the Oscars?
I was taken by this movie, a tale of deceit and thwarted love set against the sprawling misery of World War II, and troubled by the ending (for reasons, thanks to Stoddard, that I now understand more fully). But I was troubled even more by his intellectual tear-down of a movie I liked, to explain its lack of commercial success.
Stoddard claimed the film was about how writers amend reality through fiction, in this case to atone for a lie told by a prepubescent girl, a lie that separates two lovers and sends them to their deaths. (Apparently it was more true of the book, which I didn't read).
The girl turns out to be the film's narrator in the end, atoning for her lie by reconciling the lovers with a fictional ending. When this happy ending is taken from us at the movie's end we are left devastated.
But before the writers (both the real and fictional ones) get into the limelight, this movie is about a passionate love that crosses the class divide, the evils of profiting from war and the tragic consequences of jealousy and sexual repression in a so-called "innocent." Like playwright Samuel Beckett once remarked, "I am still in love with the same old questions, and the same old answers." I don't like getting tricked by alternate endings.
If the movie failed, it did so not only because it was unfaithful to the book's structure, as Stoddard claims, but because it forces us to consider the power of writers as artificers of story, rather than leaving us to our most meager rejoicings: righteous outrage, a few tears and a deeper sense of the inconceivable pathos of history.
Not all movies are meant to be books. And a writer's gift, whether he or she works in print or film, lies in the ability to make this big, fantastic catastrophe of existence comprehensible. Writers or not, we are already howling into the abyss, hoping only for a sensible reply.
We already know the novel, or the movie, is a contrivance. Just make sure the contrivance works. And if it doesn't quite, don't bring me behind the scenes even further to explain away the failure. This movie succeeds, despite its awkward structure and unexpected conceit, due to extraordinary acting, great music and certain tricks of the movie-making trade I should never have to understand.
My own personal god of narrative fiction might just love imperfection ... and woe to the mortal who can't help peering under the tent.
