Book vs. Movie: Yes Man
By Russ Bickerstaff
December 29, 2008
BoxOfficeProphets.com
And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.
Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Film.
Yes Man
London-dwelling 32-year-old Danny Wallace is a Scottish humorist who has met with considerable success in the U.K. The author of such books as How to Start Your Own Country, Join Me and Random Acts of Kindness has also worked extensively with the BBC both on TV and radio. The prolific humorist also does a great deal of work online. As popular as he is overseas, Wallace has yet to reach a very wide audience in the US. That's about to change as Wallace's autobiographical nonfiction book Yes Man gets an Americanized Hollywood film treatment in a big budget, big release movie starring Jim Carrey. How does the autobiographical work of an idiosyncratic Scottish humorist stand up to a mega-market Hollywood mutation?
The Book
On the very surface of things, Yes Man is yet another in a growing line of autobiographical one year-long project books. It's a weird sub-genre of nonfiction wherein the author agrees to do something somewhat restrictive for an entire year. In 2001, Kevin Murphy agreed to watch a film in a theater every day of the year for his book A Year At The Movies. In 2004, Julie Powell spent a year making every recipe from a Julia Child cookbook and out came Julie & Julia. More recently, A. J. Jacobs spent a year following the Bible as closely as possible, resulting in The Year of Living Biblically. With Yes Man, Danny Wallace chose a relatively simple year-long project that nonetheless ended-up effecting his year in a very invasive way. During a casual conversation on a London bus, a stranger told Wallace to say yes more often. Wallace took the offhanded comment to heart and decided to spend a year saying only yes to every single question posed to him.
The project ends up guiding Wallace through a series of gradually more and more difficult series of yeses that have bigger and bigger effects on his life. From agreeing to a service he doesn't need from a telemarketer to paying for round trip airfare from Australia to the UK for a woman he's attracted to, Wallace's yeses take him from casual freelance work with BBC radio to a substantial promotion working as a producer with BBC TV. There are a few negative effects that result from some of his yeses. He has some of his first experiences with narcotics through saying yes. He gets alarmingly close to being ripped-off by Internet scams simple better judgment would have normally steered him away from. The overall effect of the project on Wallace's life is generally quite good. While not specifically designed as an inspirational book, (the US publisher categorizes Yes Man under, "humor,") the overall theme here revolves around the power of positivity. Thankfully, Wallace's writing style comes across with far more heartfelt and honest conviction than most inspirational writing ever manages. Yes Man ends up being sort of an inspirational book for people who normally wouldn't dream of venturing into the self-help section of a bookstore - a positive message that is effectively delivered by what appears to be Wallace's genuine desire to change his own life.
The tone of Wallace's story is important, as there's nothing terribly dynamic about his narrative style. Events are discussed in a very casual conversational style that leans quite heavily on a love of witty dialog. The plot carries along in a very well-constructed dramatic arc that would seem artificial were Wallace's narrative style not so convincing. The disparate array of events that occur to him, as bizarre as some of them are, are delivered with a kind of straightforward working class everyman kind of wit that makes Yes Man work extremely well. It's fun without feeling forced. It's uplifting without violently and aggressively tugging at the heartstrings.
The most fascinating end of the story subtly sets in as we see Wallace's friends reacting to his strange behavior. His self-guided desire to unwaveringly follow the inadvertent advice of a casual stranger develops into something of an unhealthy obsession at times. The line between charming writer's eccentricity and genuine mental illness seems harrowingly thin at times. The subtle uncertainty of Wallace's state of mind lends Yes Man a uniquely charming vulnerability that goes a long way toward developing a charm that keeps it from being just another autobiographical yearlong project book. It's not exactly the kind of charm that makes for an international best-seller, but it IS the kind of charm that helps solidify a pretty successful writing career in the UK. It's also the kind of charm that looks interesting to Hollywood producers. When rumor starts circulating that someone like Jack Black is looking into the film rights to a book like this, it's not long before momentum builds and the world ends-up with a big budget film gets released with enough marketing to push it to the top of the box-office for at least one week...
The Movie
Unfortunately, Jack Black did NOT, in fact, end up being at all involved in the Yes Man film. What's worse, Wallace ended up having very little to do with it either. When Wallace was informed that Jim Carrey would be starring in an Americanized, Hollywood adaptation of his book, he was excited. Evidently he'd been a fan of the spastic, rubbery actor since In Living Color.
A book that was so driven by the voice of a single, idiosyncratic author has been adapted into what appears to be a standard assembly-line movie churned out on a Hollywood assembly line. Richard D. Zanuck and a number of other producers put together a project with three relatively new screenwriters, one of whom had no previous credits worth speaking of and the other two whose work weighed pretty heavily in TV. They cranked out a script that was directed by Peyton Reed. Jim Carrey stars as Carl Allen - a loan officer at a bank in California who has been in a rut since a divorce. Unwilling to try anything new or even make it out of his apartment after work, Allen's life seems to be on pause until an encounter with an ex-co-worker finds him visiting a seminar by self-help guru Terrence Bundley (Terence Stamp.) Bundley preaches a fanatical devotion to the word, "yes," to a convention hall full of devotees.
The Americanization of Wallace's story is okay where it sticks relatively close to the original book. The protagonist's extreme discouragement due to loss of a love and a number of other similarities between Carl Allen and Danny Wallace are all fine and good, but it's Allen's indoctrination into the power of Yes that robs the film of that which makes the book so charming. Wallace's desire to follow the call of the Yes for an entire year is entirely self-induced, giving him a kind of fascinating vulnerability that Carrey lacks in the role of Allen. By merely following the teachings of a self-help guru like a herd of others, Allen lacks the wild, untested self-motivation Wallace exhibits in the book.
Rather than confine itself to the implications of the Yes doctrine, the film sets its sites on delivering a pretty standard romantic comedy story. It does a pretty good job of delivering a pretty good story. Following his first Yes excursion, Allen is stranded in the hills having run out of gas taking a homeless person into a park of some sort. Inevitably reaching the gas station, he meets a quirky, attractive artist woman played by Zooey Deschanel, thus setting the two on a vary obvious path towards the inevitable fight and reconciliation that usually develops in a Hollywood romance. The story is, of course, populated by the types of ancillary characters that usually populate a Hollywood romance. There's enough in the film that separates it from the usual romantic comedy to make it a relatively novel experience, but this is far from a revolutionary work of popular cinema.
The Verdict
Danny Wallace's book would make for a good film. . . if it were a film featuring Danny Wallace. His unique kind of pseudo-intellectual humor is best delivered by him and him alone. The adaptation ends up being a Hollywood film that is inspired by the general premise of the book without following its plot in any but the most basic and fundamental ways. The overall plot arc is maintained without any of the flavor that made the book so unique. As a standalone romantic comedy, the Yes Man is fun, but lacks enough appeal to make it very far beyond opening week. If Wallace is to become the kind of star in the US that he is in the UK, it will have to be on his own terms with his own script both behind AND in front of the camera.