El Burro Volador

It’s been an axiom of mine for years that any given narrative will fare better as a book than as a movie.  I haven’t decided whether this is because of any inherent strength in the medium, or simply because less people are involved in producing a novel than a feature film, or for some other, more esoteric reason, I just find it to be true in nearly every case.

The biggest exception I have found in my career as a reader and moviegoer has been The Godfather.  This was a very good book, but it was a great movie, for two primary reasons that I can discern.  First, whereas the novel tends to sprawl a bit, spinning out a couple of secondary plotlines that frankly don’t add much to the book, the film is more tightly focused and compact, trimming away the extraneous bits and gaining power and momentum because of it.  Second, while Mario Puzo was an adept writer, and skilled at characterization, the film had the advantage of employing a handful of  the most brilliant actors in the profession to invest these same characters with a humanity and intensity Puzo did not achieve.

This stood as a lone example in my experience for many years, but recently it acquired a companion when I finished reading Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity.  Now, the gap is much narrower in this case, and I admit that I wasn’t sure I liked the movie more until the very end of the book.  Which I suppose is a backhanded way of recommending the novel.  Ludlum, unlike Puzo, is not a terribly good writer.  The following passage from early in the novel is fairly typical: “the white sprays caught in the night sky cascaded downward over the deck under the force of the night wind.”  Why not throw “night” in there a couple more times, really drive the point home for the reader?  And how about stacking some more prepositions into this sentence?

“The white sprays caught in the night sky plummeted downward through the night toward the benighted ship below, cascading over the deck beside the cabin ahead of the stern under the force of the night wind, all beneath the concealing cloak of night?”

Anyway, Ludlum also has a mild case of Clancyitis, drawing characters that are occasionally unrealistic or corny.  On the other hand, he came up with a very good premise, and is clearly ferociously intelligent, twisting and turning a convoluted plot in ingenious ways and using cleverly constructed traps and dangerous situations to produce crackling action sequences.

Ultimately, the movie transcends the book because it, like The Godfather, trims away the extraneous (and in this case, that includes some of the thinner characterizations) to weave a tighter version of the story.  Also, director/producer Doug Liman and company are clearly more adept at the execution of their craft than Ludlum was at his – the film has a terrific economy and intelligence in its selection of shots, cuts, etc.