This year, three out of the five 'Best Picture' nominees were based on books. Not since 2003's four nominees have there been this many. All three, of course, are also up for 'Best Adapted Screenplay.' Those three are No Country for Old Men (novel by Cormac McCarthy), Atonement (novel by Ian McEwan) and There Will Be Blood (novel by Upton Sinclair). The two that round out the adapted screenplay noms are Away From Her (short story by Alice Munro) and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (memoir by Jean-Dominique Bauby). I've read two of these books and can speak for those, and the films adapted from them, but not the rest.
Atonement definitely captures the feel of McEwan's wonderful novel. Christopher Hampton, the screenwriter, seems to dwell in adapting stories from the past; in costume dramas, if you will. He's adapted The Quiet American, The Secret Agent, Carrington, Mary Reilly and Dangerous Liaisons, for which he won the Oscar in 1988. So, this kind of thing was no fluke. The difficulties in adapting Atonement lay in a number of different ways. For one, there's the problem of point of view. How does one show what is going on versus what one perceives is going on? This is a key plot point early on in the book and film, driving everything that happens after. Another problem to overcome is the progress of time, tracking specific characters as they grow older, yet somehow maintaining that POV. Of course, Hampton tackles these problems with ease, constructing the screenplay so that it was not restricted by particular film conventions.
No Country for Old Men is one of the few adaptations I've seen that really captured not only the salient plot points, but also the tone, voice and descriptive power of the original novelist. Cormac McCarthy has written some incredibly dark material over his lifetime (though he started in the novel writing business late in his life). Books like Blood Meridian and The Road aren't exactly uplifting works. What they are, however, is brilliant pieces of literature. No Country for Old Men finds the Coen Brothers in sync with McCarthy in such a way as I've never seen before. Had this adaptation not been done by the Coens, we could have easily seen some horrible changes (i.e., a wrap-up to the money situation, certain characters surviving, our hero Sheriff figuring things out in a more linear way and staying in law enforcement). But the Coens got the point of the novel, which wasn't about a foiled drug sale, or a guy who finds money and lives on the run, or a bounty hunter. It's about the changing face of crime and violence in this country. It's about how lawmen of a certain era can't stem the tide or keep apace of the escalating evil created by greed. Although McCarthy actually does give us a little more about the money at the end of the book, it's unnecessary in the film to make their point. It doesn't matter whether Moss, Chigurh or a truckload of bandits end up with the money. What matters is that we know things don't end up well.
My favorite scene in the movie, for its acting, and the writing, is when Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones, is talking in a café with Moss' wife, played by Kelly Macdonald. For a while throughout the film, Bell and his deputy are trying to figure out how Chigurh kills his victims. In the café, Bell offhandedly tells a story of a slaughterhouse and mentions a device that punches a hole into the brain. There is no grand revelation speech, moment of clarity or even a change of expression. We know, in that moment, that Bell has figured out, whether at that time or some time previous, what Chigurh is using as a weapon. It's magnificently understated. In a 'Hollywood' film, you would have seen this elaborate scene where the Sheriff and his Deputy suss out what happened through a C.S.I.-like deductive reasoning session. Or, in that same café scene, you would have seen Bell telling the story, and then having this grand revelatory expression, something like leaning back in his chair, with a half smile, looking to the side, then shaking his head in disbelief. Thankfully, the Coens were in charge of this one, and we ended up with a brilliant scene and film.
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