Now that I'm on the record as having really dug the living shit out of Sam Mendes' Away We Go - as well as being a big Revolutionary Road fan - I guess I feel like I've gotta take a more active role in paying attention to what the dude's lining up next. And via DH comes some of that, so let's hop on-board.
"Focus Features has signed a two-year first-look deal with Sam Mendes and his Neal Street Productions reports Variety.
The deal includes two potential directing vehicles for Mendes - an adaption of John Williams' 1960-penned revisionist western "Butcher's Crossing" and the British period piece "Middlemarch".
Set in 1870s America, 'Crossing' focuses on a man who forsakes his Harvard education to move to the small Kansas town of Butcher's Crossing. There, he joins the hunt for one of the last great buffalo herds.
"Middlemarch", based on the George Eliot novel and adapted by Andrew Davies, deals with the changing fortunes in a provincial English community in the early 1830s."
According to its Wiki page Middlemarch has been adapted for television twice before, 1968 and 1994, both times as a BBC miniseries. The writer Andrew Davies, who's attached to Mendes' film, also scripted the 1994 version, and if you glance through his IMDb page you'll practically get high off of the Esteemed British Literariness of it all. I've neither read nor seen any Middlemarch ever.
As for Butcher's Crossing, it sounds intriguing:
"It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek "an original relation to nature," drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher's Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher's Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher's Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been."
Hear hear to an "orgy of slaughter" y'all!
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7 comments:
Andrew Davies is bad bad bad for literature. He throws in anachronistic sex into all of his adaptations, arguing that "the authors would have done so, had they been able."
There's very little sex in Middlemarch. It's sort of what the whole thing is about. And yet, Stupid Fucking Davies (his Christian name, as it were) will find some way to tart it up.
Oooooooo how I hate him.
Middlemarch is probably my favourite book. Andrew Davies' adaptation isn't dreadful but it's a disappointment for anyone who's read the book, which is rich, humane and sympathetic to even the most deplorable characters. The heroes and heroines are flawed, the villains are troubled and sympathetic. I know that popular opinion has changed towards American Beauty, but it's a very humane film (that shot of Mena Suvari crying on the stairs always stays with me). So I'm not adverse to Sam Mendes directing, although I'd also be interested to see what Joe Wright would do with it.
Middlemarch was a fairly early adaptation of Andrew Davies, before he showed us Colin Firth's wet breeches in wet breeches. But it made the novel seem dry, which it really really isn't, and it completely fumbled the characterisation of the heroine. I agree with Mike, there's often a lot of sex and style in Andrew Davies' adaptations (especially his fairly graphic adaptation of The Line Of Beauty) but it's often at the expense of character, and Middlemarch is very much a character-driven novel.
Sorry for the ramble. Just feel uber-defensive over the possible ruining of one of my favourite books by a fashionable, but not terrible reliable screenwriter.
I personally think Davies did a great job adapting Pride and Prejudice for the BBC back in 1996. There, I said it.
Middlemarch though would be a challenge for anyone to adapt for the screen. It's such a complex, complicated novel with so much depth and philosophy behind it...with the time constraints of a film, I just don't think it's humanly possible to encapsulate it into one movie.
I really don't have anything to add to this, not knowing any of his work or the book itself, but I just wanna say y'all rock and I am loving this. Thanks for the back-and-forth on it. More more! I should read the book then?
I think you should at least try (though, admittedly, I'm more of a Daniel Deronda man myself). Full disclosure: it took me several tries to get through it. The emotions Eliot explores are timeless; however, the motivations behind those emotions are very much of their time and place -- and it can be frustrating as a modern reader.
The other thing is, it's usually helpful to drag someone else into reading a novel. While the reading part is pretty solitary, the understanding part is best done in tandem. Especially, in the case of Middlemarch, at the beginning when Dorothea Brooke can make you want to pull your hair out because she's making choices that are incredibly frustrating.
And as far as Andrew Davies goes: When I marry Commenter Ben (don't tell my boyfriend), he and I will publish a long thesis called "Y Andy Kan't Read" (with a foreward by Tori Amos). For instance, he recently completely misunderstood Brideshead Revisited, which is much more about religion than it is about sex and class. He got Bleak House righter than usual; however, he basically destroyed Trollope's He Knew He Was Right (ironic, I know).
I don't think the Victorians were necessarily prudish about sex -- or more prudish than we are about it. I do think they understand that sex stops a narrative in its tracks. There is no plot or character development in sex. And besides, it's not like the Victorians didn't know what sex was. A Victorian writer, having too characters disappear together for a short period, gave enough information for the reader to suss out what happened in the barley field or in the maid's quarters. The Victorians were corseted, not stupid.
@Mike. I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on Daniel Deronda. What a fascinating novel...way, way ahead of its time. Did you see Andrew Davies' adaptation of that? I thought he did a better job of that than with Middlemarch, although I think Romola Garai understood Gwendolyn better than he did. And the "upbeat" ending made me want to scream.
I agree with you about Bleak House as well. But then, I guess Dickens suits Davies' soapier stylings better than other Victorian writers.
Just read the last paragraph.
It's all anyone remembers.
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