News Editor John O’Connor explores the risky terrain of literary adaptation, where beloved novels risk dilution on the path to the screen, what it truly means to adapt, and whether some stories are better left on the page.
When discussing recycling, minds drift to regurgitated waste; crushed glass and pulped paper transformed into a commodity to consume and spit out again at our leisure. We do not view directors who place words from the pages of our most sacred works of fiction on the big screen in the same vein. Yet, since a film is inherently a faithful - or not so faithful - transcript of a novel, it is essentially piggybacking on the reputation and wider interest in the original work. Comparison is inevitable, and for many adaptations, it proves to be certain death.
It seems almost in the nature of film, regardless of quality, to remove, dilute and simplify any great novel which it attempts to adapt. The failure rate in adaptation seems so spectacular that many directors choose to write their own works or purchase newly written scripts. It is no surprise that the novels adapted are those that already exist in the nucleus of an impressive fanbase; this is attractive to any director - the title alone will fill seats. The possible coin earned from its potential success however has two sides: the very fans who directors expect to swarm theatres are also those most likely to turn their backs if the winds of disservice or exploitation are felt, choosing instead to denounce the project altogether.
Here is a scene: amongst the violent winds of the Yorkshire Moors Emily Brontë creates her 1847 magnum opus - Wuthering Heights. She imagines Cathy and Heathcliff locked in perpetual lust - two eagles, talons interlocked and plummeting down to Earth to see who will break free first. It is a tale of all-consuming love, revenge, race, class, and power - renowned for its unadaptability. A minor novel can serve as a pretext, a repertoire of themes with which the director is free to play. With a great novel, there is the problem of being “faithful” to it - balancing on the tightrope between reverence and reinvention. Enter Emerald Fennell; a white and more “sympathetic” Heathcliff, both brute and innocent, Isabella in bondage and Margot Robbie in a clear plastic dress, decades before its invention, tied up with a bow. As if a package waiting to be unwrapped - some gifts are best left unopened, untouched and our need to know what is inside unsullied as to bring us right back to the first page again. Fennell serves this need on a platter and wraps it in latex. Essentially, classics are cursed. Yet - I believe - predestined failure in this hybrid medium can be avoided from a single thought: To adapt or not to adapt, that is the question - one that many, Fennell included, fail to ask or care to answer.
As if a package waiting to be unwrapped - some gifts are best left unopened, untouched and our need to know what is inside unsullied as to bring us right back to the first page again. Fennell likes to serve this need on a platter and wrap it in latex.
Last year, Chloé Zhao succeeded where Fennell was thwarted. In her adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet she brings both O'Farrell's and Shakespeare’s work to life - in her own way, strip the work down to its bones and see how they shine in the unforgiving light of what it truly is to be human. It is Zhao’s anatomy lesson of the human soul. It follows Agnes, the wife of the playwright, an arresting character in her own right, as they lose their son. The film has the distension of a novel, episodic in nature, and a clear vision from beginning to end despite its unravelling of the original text. What O’Farrell can unfurl across a chapter, Zhao distils into a single, arresting frame. An animalistic, primal scream from a mourning mother can reveal more about Agnes than any line of prose ever could.
Hamnet becomes less an adaptation of a great novel, play and life that came before it and more a meditation on adaptation itself - not of story, but of human feeling. Zhao knows that what endures is not plot but the human impulse to reshape grief, love, and longing into something that can be digested for generations and centuries to come, and in doing so makes one cherish life in the face of death. Here, art is not a static object to be faithfully reproduced like crushed glass, but a living vessel through which the most primal emotions are stretched, broken, and reborn. It is a celebration of our endless, and human, capacity to adapt our own turmoil into forms that can be revisited and reinterpreted, again and again, each time revealing something more devastatingly true. In doing so, this adaptation achieves something most seasoned directors cannot; convince the audience to read the source material and, even further, read the play and dissect the lives of those that inspired it. Its very existence exists in its ability to be adapted. The question whether to adapt or not to is futile - without constant adoption of this work and that which inspired it, it simply ceases to exist. This film will, in truth, break you and put you back together, maybe better than before.
In the end, the question is if a story should be adapted, but why. When driven by spectacle or profit, adaptation falters, collapsing into a false imitation of itself. When approached as translation rather than replication, it can transcend its original source. To adapt is not to recycle, but to resurrect - to give shape to words and unseen emotion. The finest adaptations do not replace the original; they constrict and expand it, sending us out of the theatre and into the world with new understanding. In that rebirth, something essential and adored is not lost, but finally, truly found for the first very time on screen.