This free-wheeling adaptation of Bradbury's classic novel is intriguing, but doesn't quite work. By conflating the Clarisse and Faber characters, it halves the exposition but it also halves the power of the story. For me, Faber is the novel's central character, and without his insightful defense of literature and freedom we only get one side of the argument. In Truffaut's film, no one explains WHY books are important, why they matter - so given that Montag only becomes violent AFTER he starts reading, this version comes dangerously close to supporting Captain Beatty's argument: an ignorant society is a safe one. It becomes less a story about censorship and "the forgetting of history" as a means of social control, and more about the repressed emotions that reading might unlock. While this does pick up on one of Bradbury's minor recurring themes - the importance of "the natural" - it isn't "Fahrenheit 451". Moreover, the relentlessly miserable look of this film misses Bradbury's point. His dystopian future isn't grim: it's a hyper-real America of neat green lawns and porch-less houses, a facade of state-sanctioned happiness masking the horror within. Truffaut's just looks like East Germany. I'm not sure why he went so far off track, because adapting this novel isn't difficult. I wrote an adaptation of it as a college screen writing assignment and found that if you stick with the book, it pretty much falls into place. Bradbury himself has said: "My books are movies already. Just take out the pages and stuff them in the camera." While that isn't quite true (there are huge slabs of melodramatic dialogue to be culled, and plenty of anachronisms to weed out), there is a lot to be said for faithful adaptations of his work - especially this one. There are few writers in sci-fi - or in any genre - who combine Bradbury's native talent for visual storytelling with such an intelligent interest in big themes. "Fahrenheit 451" is crying out for a remake. The case it puts is resurgently relevant, and our digital technology makes screening its disturbing and beautiful images entirely possible, even easy. Frank Darabont ("The Shawshank Redemption", "The Green Mile", "The Majestic" and scribe of "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein") is slated to write and direct a new version for Castle Rock Entertainment sometime soon. Darabont has a great eye and a strong sense of story. More than anyone else in Hollywood today, he knows how to tell this kind of tale. If he can just resist the urge to "go Capra" and turn it into some kind of sappy, futuristic Norman Rockwell painting, I'm confident he's the man to pull it off. With it's memorable characters, compelling plot and powerful themes, it has Oscar® written all over it. I can see it now... Keanu Reeves (in "Speed" mode) as Montag, Anthony Hopkins as Faber, Robert De Niro as Captain Beatty (although Frank will probably cast Jeffrey DeMunn!)... in the right hands, it's a cross-category winner just waiting to be born.
Review of Fahrenheit 451
