Cinema
Phantasmagoria
Peter Ackroyd
The fact that John Irving's novels are
impossible mpossible to break up and then reassemble in the shape of a film narrative does not seem to have stopped anyone so far: his The World According to Garp was turned into what might be called a 'diffi- cult' picture, and Tony Richardson has now taken up The Hotel New Hampshire only to put it down again rather diffidently. It is not at all clear what he expected to make of it but, obviously despairing of some last-minute revelation, he has chosen instead to stay as close to the text as he dare. And that is the problem. The images and events are the same, but there are so many of them in the novel that it would require an Abel Gance-like epic to afford them all sufficient room. And so the salient elements — urgan terrorism, rape, incest, blindness, hotels, motorbikes, bears, Vien- na and a dog named Sorrow — are here given what can only be described as kaleidoscopic treatment. The effect is that of a film running at the wrong speed — like
' a silent picture which has suddenly and unaccountably been lent the gift of sound. In other words, those who have not pre- viously read the novel will find it very difficult to understand what is going on.
Irving is a very resourceful writer who manages to combine comedy and tragedy, appalling melancholy and equally appalling high spirits; the final effect hovers some- where between George Gissing and P. G. Wodehouse. The essential point, however, is that he has spent a lifetime fashioning the kind of prose which will allow him to encompass a broad range of effects without showing untoward strain. But such a lan- guage can only be transferred to the screen in isolated bursts of narrative (dialogue is not enough — dialogue, in a film, is just dialogue), and as a result Irving's generally private and certainly peculiar vision can only be fitfully glimpsed through the gener- al busy-ness of character and action. Tony Richardson has decided to follow his au- thor by treading on that dangerous ground between fantasy and realism, but in visual terms this simply means that he veers uneasily between slapstick and sen- timentality: without the prose there is no vision and, instead of taking the opportun- ity to create something quite different, he has come up with an inferior version of the same thing.
And so we get a number of small and often exuberant scenes which can be strung together only haphazardly: the film works, when it works at all, as a result of these small episodes but they are a poor substi- tute for the depth or spaciousness which is required in such an enterprise. The plot itself is not quite enough, as this extract from the press-office synopsis may suggest: `Wim Berry, Franny, John and Lilly travel ahead and find that the "Gasthaus Freud" is a rundown hotel whose only occupants are political radicals and prostitutes, Freud, who is now very old and blind, and his new bear Susie — a girl who is hiding from the world in a bear suit. Undeterred, the family sets to work to make the hotel habitable, but when they receive the news that mother and Egg have died in a plane crash on their way to Vienna. . . .' And so it goes, as another American novelist might put it; and goes, and goes, and goes.
Since the eponymous hotel is a home for both villains and eccentrics, there is cer- tainly scope for broad humour but even the comic interludes are set at a distance by the relentless jollity which pervades the film: words like 'madcap' and 'zany' spring to mind before sinking back again. Even the cast cannot help in these circumstances. Although Jodie Foster is a perfectly ade- quate nymphette, and Nastassja Kinski shows added depth as the inside of a bear- suit, the discontinuous and slightly crazed manner in which their characters are brought to the screen turns them into car- toon figures only.
One is left with a feeling of bafflement about the nature of the story and then, when the broad lines of the plot have finally been established, a further difficulty in understanding quite what the point of it all might be. The nearest the film comes to that point is in its use of Irving's own slogan, 'Life Is Serious, Art Is Fun' — which, I suppose, is one definition of comedy itself — but it means, in terms of this production, only that apparently 'se- rious' themes such as suicide and urban terrorism are smuggled into a narrative which depends upon imperfect clockwork artifice for its main effects.
But the tragic disasters and comic im- broglios are not complementary here: they simply cancel out each other. They can be combined in fiction because the boundaries of the novel are more flexible; you cannot go so far, or say so much, in the cinema because the laws of film are more rigid — or, rather, more difficult to break without entirely discomposing an audience. The Hotel New Hampshire has a broadly sen- timental charm, since high-spirited melan- choly is always a powerful force, but it is not really enough to disguise the fact that this is a fundamentally misconceived ven- ture.
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