Who would you have star in the latest unfilmable novel?
Reading
Girl on the Train, I immediately
started imagining who would play the characters when it inevitably becomes a
film. We all do this, and we all do a lousy job, but that’s part of what makes
the exercise such harmless fun. I remember a childhood conversation, before Spider-Man had been filmed, two
incarnations ago. We were wondering who would play Gwen Stacey, and my friend
Matt ventured “Streep?” Streep?! Never mind that she was even then too old to
play a kid, was Meryl Streep ever a teenager? Hell, she was a haunted angel in The Seduction of Joe Tynan.
Since
Girl on the Train has been hyped as
the next Gone Girl (they’re both
girls!), I immediately cast Ben Affleck as Tom, the ex-husband of the titular
Girl, which makes no sense. Then I went with Aaron Eckhart. I can’t explain why
without divulging spoilers. All right, I’ll tell you. Tom gets half his face
melted off and becomes a criminal supervillain.
I
cast Jeanne Tripplehorn as Rachel, even though Hollywood hasn’t given her a
leading role since she turned twenty-four. I don’t care; I think she could play
Rachel’s hazed-out desperation, based on her work in The Firm, I guess. Okay, it was Waterworld.
That’s the miracle of movies: a viewer can hold on to the memory of a
performance long after Tinseltown has chewed the performer up and spat her out.
Realizing
this, I tried to second-guess what Hollywood would actually do and came up with
. . . Jennifer Lawrence, based on her crazy-eyed work in American Hustle and the fact that the answer to every question
about actresses is Jennifer Lawrence. Googled to see who’s actually going to be
playing the role for the film already in development and it’s . . . Deanna
Durbin? No, wait, that was the 1945 production of Lady on a Train. The Girl train is on track(!) to be an Emily
Blunt project.
So
I’m no good at casting movies that are going to be films soon. What about
movies that will never be made into films? Surely I can do better there.
Granted,
they’ve actually tried to film a lot of unfilmable books, for example Naked Lunch; Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation, putatively based on The Orchid Thief; and Howl (casting James Franco for your
unfilmable movie is a cop-out). Maybe those books are just screaming (or
Howling! By the way, The Howling
franchise is the strangest movie adaptation of Ginsberg’s poem, and didn’t get
enough credit when Franco’s movie came out) for some ambitious director to film
them, because of their very unfilmability, but there are other books which aren’t
throwing down a gauntlet but are just unfilmable because they exist in worlds
of the mind.
If
you had to keep checking the title page to confirm that The Dog was written by the same Joseph O’Neill who wrote Netherland, you were not alone. While Netherland earned accolades and
comparisons to Gatsby for its pulsing
and earnest depiction of a first-world striver as witnessed by the narrator, The Dog is a satirical stream-of-consciousness
spree from the mind of an unnamed lawyer living and thinking in detachment in
the sterile confines of Dubai skyscrapers. He lays out a system of personal
rules and rationales as a plot gently bumps into him from time to time and then
suddenly catches up to him. It’s so much about the character and his
disassociated embrace of the seemingly dehumanizing aspects of humanity that it
reminds me of Up in the Air, which,
damn it, they turned into a halfway decent movie! Still, I’m not casting
Clooney.
I
want to cast Aaron Eckhart, but isn’t that just because I was talking about him
before? How about Ben Affleck? No! Clear the mind. Who is a chilly intellectual
type who seems somewhat removed from his moral code, but not? Jessie
Eisenberg’s too young, but that’s what I thought about Jeanne Tripplehorn. No,
let’s go with . . . Michael Shannon!
Nicholson
Baker’s The Anthologist is just a guy
ruminating about poetry. There are other Baker books that would make for
visually stimulating cinema, but not this one. Oh, let’s just get Gene Hackman
out of retirement. Tell him it’s not a cop, see if he bites.
There But For The by Ali Smith is actually quite filmable. Take out all the postmodern
experimentalism and you’ve got a zany story with multiple points of view,
something movies don’t actually do all that well but that they do all the time.
Still, it’s got a weird title and a gay protagonist and I think that will put
the financial backers off. So I’m going to cast it and come up with a new
Hollywood-friendly title. Let’s cast Mr.
Robot’s Elliot Alderson as young Miles Garth, Michael Shannon as grown
Garth, Jeanne Tripplehorn as older Anna, Chloë Grace Moretz as young Anna,
Susan Sarandon as the demented May Young (even though she is still beautiful
and should still be starring in romantic dramas, but Hollywood sucks and I do
like to see her in movies), and an unknown as Brooke, the kid. Call it Grace of God, make Miles Garth straight,
have love conquer all, and make it an ongoing series on Netflix. It’s probably
already in development with Emily Blunt.
Or
you could just read the book and cast it yourself.
--Dan Kilian
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