November 6th, 2007
11. Portnoy's Complaint (1972)
In Portnoy's Complaint and Goodbye, Columbus, Richard Benjamin proved a perfect Philip Roth surrogate. Woody Allen even cast Benjamin in his own Roth homage, Deconstructing Harry. Yet not even Benjamin could save 1972's ill-fated adaptation of Portnoy's Complaint, which preserved much of the crudity but little of the wit and deceptive warmth of Roth's groundbreaking exploration of the sexual neuroses of Jewish males. Six-time Oscar nominee Ernest Lehman has an astonishing track record as a screenwriter (West Side Story, Sweet Smell Of Success, North By Northwest, Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?) but Portnoy's Complaint snuffed out Lehman's directorial career in its infancy: his first directing job was also his last.
12. Tropic Of Cancer (1970)
According to his autobiography (which, incidentally, everyone on Earth should read) Robert Evans ended up green-lighting 1970's Tropic Of Cancer as part of a bet with good buddy Henry Miller. Yet even in the freewheeling Hollywood of the late '60s and early '70s, the resulting film was self-indulgent and rambling even by the era's exceedingly lenient standards, and its X rating sure didn't do much for its box-office. It could be much worse: Claude Chabrol's Quiet Days In Clichy cast Andrew McCarthy, of all people, as Henry Miller (a big step down from Cancer's ever-dependable Rip Torn), though the casting makes a little more sense in light of the film's subplot about Miller falling in love with a beautiful mannequin come to life.
13. Bee Season (2005)
There might be a terrific, touching movie to be made of Myla Goldberg's terrific, touching debut novel about a champion speller and her unraveling family, but the 2005 film wasn't it. God bless Richard Gere, but he's simply the wrong choice to play an overbearing, academic Jewish dad. More importantly, dual directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel apparently skipped the part of the text that explores this family's motivations for its various obsessions. It's the perfect example of a film draining the life out of a book without really changing a detail, just by missing the heart.
14. Stuart Little (1999)
E.B. White's beloved 1945 classic about the little child who happens to be three inches tall and look like a mouse got the standard computer-animated, celebrity-voice, trumped-up antagonist treatment. And while some of the updates are understandable (it was hard to resist the videogame-friendly toy-roadster chase in those heady synergistic days), the movie eviscerates the book's poignant message. Instead of setting out to find his fortune in the manner of heroes from time immemorial, Michael J. Fox's Stuart gets lost and has to find his way back to the embrace of his adoptive parents. Way to encapsulate the fleeting family-values zeitgeist of the '90s, filmmakers: Life's ultimate meaning shrinks from the expanses of adventure and autonomy to the provincial comforts of hearth and home.
15. Even Cowgirls Get The Blues (1993)
Some prose-to-film adaptations go wrong because they ditch the story aspects that made the books interesting in the first place. Others go wrong in simple conception. There was no chance Tom Robbins' sprawling, trippy, picaresque novel Even Cowgirls Get The Blues could make it to the big screen intact; his loopy run-on thoughts, philosophical musings, bizarre extended metaphors, and meta-references are hilarious and dreamlike on the page, where he can burrow into his weird ideas at length and readers can meander back and forth through them, looking for sense. The book is like a crazy, drug-addled conversation between Robbins and the reader, with Robbins helpfully explaining what "the author" is attempting. But the film is more like a drunken, overbearing monologue. Compressed for film and stripped of much of the explorative depth and colorful language, the book's events become shallow, ridiculous, and incoherent, and the forced attempts to make them funny are just embarrassing. Maybe that's why no one has attempted a Robbins adaptation since.
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