Book vs. Movie: The Rite
By Russ Bickerstaff
February 2, 2011
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. Movie.
The Rite
An American journalist living in Rome, Matt Baglio became fascinated when he found out that an American priest had been sent there by his bishop to study exorcism. Father Gary Thomas of California was nice enough to allow Baglio to join him in the journey. Baglio had come to witness some 20 exorcisms that Father Thomas had participated in. With that and a little bit of background, Baglio was able to craft a tight little 250-page book about modern exorcism and the journey of Father Thomas.
While Baglio was still researching the book, film producers Tripp Vinson and Beau Flynn heard about the project. The producing team behind The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Flynn and Vinson bought the film rights to the emerging novel, promptly contacting screenwriter Michael Petroni to work on a script. Petroni was in contact with Baglio as he worked on the script. The two men were working on book and film script more or less at the same time. Starring Anthony Hopkins, the film was released by Warner Bros. this past week, The film grossed $14.7 million opening weekend on a reported $37 million production budget. With a wide-ranging appeal to Catholics and various other Christians worldwide, the film could turn a relatively healthy profit. How does the film compare with the book it's based on - a book that is likely to reach a far smaller audience?
The Book
Matt Baglio’s The Rite has been praised as a fair and skeptical look into the subject of modern exorcism. Skeptical though it may be, it doesn’t compare with some of the very best work of its kind. The very best work in the realm of unexplained phenomena falls into one of two categories: either journalistic or critically insightful. Jerome Clark’s work in the field of Ufology is particularly strong journalistic stuff. There’s nothing quite like reading detailed accounts of UFO sightings and abductions written in stultifyingly dull journalistic prose that leaves nothing to the imagination. The fascinating thing about Clark’s work is that the terminally dry and composed nature of the narrative lets the facts speak for themselves. The fascinating nature of the subject matter bleeds through the corners of cold, hard fact. It’s really exhilarating work because it is written in such a boring literary voice. Critically insightful prose is considerably trickier to bring across. One of the best examples of this in recent years has been Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stare At Goats. Ronson’s delicate balance of humor, straightforward journalism and insightful perspective rendered a remarkably provocative book.
Baglio’s prose in The Rite doesn’t quite have the impact of either journalistic or critically insightful approaches to the unknown. The text weaves back and forth from simple, textbook-style historical prose and straightforward, commercial narrative delivery. Some of his choices feel a bit odd. The book opens with a narrative describing an exorcism. Only in the notes at the end of the book is it revealed that the description is rendered from an audio recording that the author had access to. The journalistic approach would have perhaps been to transcribe the tape’s audio in print. It would’ve had the effect of introducing the reader to the book’s subject matter in a raw form that would’ve been much more effective. A Ronson-like approach to it may have been to autobiographically describe receiving the tape and listening to it, complete with personal reactions to it in a way that was both funny and provocative. Baglio’s fiction-like narration of the exorcism as delivered to the page at the beginning of the book felt uninspired. In one form or another, much of the book suffers from this lack of inspiration in presentation.
This is not to say that it doesn’t have its strengths. Baglio’s narrative is very character-driven. We get a very personal look at the background of a man who had been in the mortuary business prior to joining the priesthood and eventually recruited to go to Rome to study exorcism. The strength of this lies in its ability to deliver the personal-level interest of a subject matter that may not seem all that significant beyond the suffering of individuals.
Baglio’s exorcists come across as a combination of a few different quite mundane professions. On the one hand, they come across as physicians. Evidently, the practice of the exorcist is a lot less glamorous than Max Von Sydow made it look in 1973. Exorcisms evidently take numerous sessions over the course of several years. People aren’t bedridden with demonic afflictions so much as they are inconvenienced by them. In this light, the possession ends up coming across much less dramatically — it’s more of an existential infection than a complete takeover of a host body. Also — the exorcists of Baglio’s The Rite seem to handle the job almost full-time. They seem a bit like exterminators in this respect. And then there’s the fact that these demons are out of hell on some kind of parole. They don’t seem to take pleasure in the suffering they’re causing — it’s just a side effect of them moving from Hell (an unpleasant place) to our world (a less unpleasant place.) In this respect, the exorcists come across like case workers. It’s all very mundane stuff, which doesn’t exactly lend itself towards seeming all that interesting. It’s more of a curiosity than anything.
Perhaps part of the significance I’m missing here lies in the fact that I grew up outside religion - Judeo-Christian or otherwise. The world is a lot more complicated than simple black or white Good vs. Evil. In the modern world, the most profound suffering and destruction is caused by human apathy and otherwise blameless self-interest. On an individual level, it’s perfectly okay and nothing to be ashamed of, but when hundreds of thousands of people are all acting in such a manner, huge injustices erupt. The very worst things in the world aren’t caused by outright malevolence — just lack of perspective. That’s life in the world of quantum causality. Without even glancing in the direction of the bigger, modern picture its author is treading in the shadow of, The Rite feels kind of silly and inconsequential.
The Movie
The film constructs a narrative established by the world described in the book. Colin O'Donoghue plays Michael Kovac — a man who worked in a mortuary alongside his father, played by Rutger Hauer. Kovac is a dramatically enhanced version of Father Gary Thomas. O'Donoghue has a bit of James Dean in his stride as he drifts into seminary school out of sheer uncertainty. His performance is interesting enough to hold his place in the film as a chance encounter with a dying woman on the street complicates his desire to drop out of the seminary. Kovac’s compassionately rumpled student advisor Father Matthew (briefly played by Toby Jones in the single most interesting performance of the film) suggests that he go off to study exorcism in Rome, then decide if he really wants to drop out of the priesthood.
Filmed on location in Budapest and Rome, the location that bleeds in through the background of the film is nicely atmospheric once its protagonist leaves America. There are a few classroom scenes that establish Kovac as a sharp and shrewd skeptic. Excorcist instructor Father Xavier takes note of Kovac’s skepticism and promptly sends him off on assignment to visit with a seasoned practicing exorcist Father Lucas Trevant (Anthony Hopkins.) With Toby Jones bringing in the single most appealing performance in the film, Hopkins’ early scenes come in kind of a close second. Here he’s playing kind of a weary iconoclast — shades of a darker version of his performance in The World’s Fastest Indian. That charm fades out as the standard Hollywood plot structure runs its course. Before long, Hopkins’ exorcist is suffering from demonic possession of his own as he drifts into a version of Hannibal Lecter that can’t help but be mildly comical in spite of itself. Even an actor of Hopkins’ caliber can’t help screenwriter Michael Petroni’s tremendously goofy version of Baal — one of the seven princes of Hell.
Between Baal and a mildly haunting performance by Italian actress Marta Gastini as a demonically possessed pregnant woman, the film compromises the book’s mundane look at the process of exorcism with something a bit more Hollywood. These demons manifest themselves in ways that appear suitably dramatic for the big screen, but without all the head swiveling and projectile vomiting that would make it all seem excessively silly. The biggest departure here seems to be the exorcists’ continual questioning of the demon to attempt to ascertain its name. The theory here is that, if you know the true name of a demon, that gives you power over it. The problem with this as cited in Baglio’s book is that demons do tend to lie — about everything. If a young woman at a bar isn’t going to tell some obnoxious guy her real name, there’s really no reason to believe a demon would reveal its real name to someone who wants to cut short its vacation in Italy. It’s a particularly dramatic moment in the film when a valiantly empowered Kovac demands the name of the demon inhabiting the body of Anthony Hopkins — the one causing hime to act so silly. And rather than come right out and say the name of screenwriter Michael Petroni, Hopkins dramatically expels air in a moan that resonates into the name of Baal. It’s a dramatic moment, but it betrays the duplicitous nature of the demon that seemed so incapable of telling the truth — so ingenious at lying. It’s dramatic, but it sort of weakens the whole film. And so it goes into the closing credits in a very traditional Hollywood trajectory…
The Verdict
While it’s far from being completely pointless, Matt Baglio’s The Rite lacks the kind of depth and insight that would make it a truly interesting work of journalism. Inspired by the world described in Baglio’s book, the film relates a story that theoretically could’ve been compelling if it bothered to follow some of the book’s finer details just a little bit closer. As it stands, neither film nor book are particularly satisfying. Baglio’s The Rite reads like particularly promising notes for a film that never really ended up getting made. Had those notes been available in their entirety to a screenwriter with a more ingenious design for bringing them to the screen, the film could’ve been a quasi-fictional crystallization of an uneven, uninspired work of nonfiction. There’s no questioning that the subject matter of modern exorcism could have the potential for being interesting on some level, but neither Baglio nor the screenwriter manage to muster enough inspiration to deliver on that potential.