Book Vs. Movie: Water For Elephants
By Russ Bickerstaff
April 27, 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.
Water For Elephants
Canadian-born author Sara Gruen moved to America to get a job doing technical writing. When that fell through, she decided to get into fiction. Unlike so many others, Gruen actually managed a fair amount of nearly immediate success as a fiction author. Her knowledge of the equestrian world helped propel her first two horse-based novels to a publisher and commercial success. Her third novel, evidently, was something she’d kicked out for National Novel Writing Month. It concerned the life of a veterinarian traveling with a circus in the 1930s. Initially rejected by the publisher of her first two novels, a different publisher picked it up and promptly turned it into a New York Times bestseller. Published in 2006, the wheels were set in motion for it to be developed into a film. Five years later, that film is released courtesy of a 20th Century Fox production helmed by music video director Francis Lawrence, starring Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon. The novel was a commercial success. Will the film match that success?
The Book
The novel may have been initially kicked out in about a month, but Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants bears all the hallmarks of a well-researched work of historical fiction. The plot involves a man named Jacob Jankowski. Jacob is studying to become a veterinarian, but his studies are cut short when his parents pass away, As the family farm is deep in debt at the time of Jacob’s parents’ death, there is no money for him to remain in school. Uncertain of what to do, Jacob runs away, hopping a train bound for Anywhere Else.
The train turns out to belong to belong to a traveling circus run by a man named Uncle Al. With no other options open to him, Jacob begins working menial labor for the circus. Fate quickly finds him working as a doctor with the diverse animals of the circus and casually falling in love with Marlena — the wife of the circus’s animal trainer. The trainer is a kind of a vicious man by he name of August.
The plot progresses as Jacob advances into the upper-class of the circus’s social structure and gradually begins to get closer to Marlena. August is abusive towards her. Jacob heals animals. She naturally gravitates towards Jacob. The circus picks-up an ill-tempered elephant when it is meant to be picking up a noted circus freak from a disintegrating circus operation. The heyday of the circus is coming to a close, though, and it isn’t long before the circus also falls apart beneath Uncle Al, Jacob and Marlena.
The other end of the novel follows a much older Jacob living in a nursing home in the contemporary world. As nice and quaint as this may be, seeing what became of Jacob at the end of everything doesn’t really add anything to the story. It feels as though it may have been added merely to give the book a little bit more physical weight to it. Without the chapters featuring the older Jacob, the novel would be slightly shorter. Perhaps Gruen, or Gruen’s publisher were concerned that the novel wouldn’t seem substantial enough to readers without a few added chapters. The portions of the story that take place in the present seem a bit stilted and tacked-on.
Quaint and digestible though it may be, Water For Elephants doesn’t seem like a work of inspiration so much as it was something for Gruen to do. Though it is generously peppered with details about life in a traveling circus in the 1930s, it hardly seems to have much of a significant existence beyond that. There’s really no insight into circus life or the life of a group of performers to be found here. It ends up feeling a lot like an MFA creative writing project — develop a plot, create the characters, do the background research, tack on something about the main character when he’s older and place it throughout the book. It’s all quite nice and everything and the book feels very well-crafted, but there really isn’t much there beyond the mechanics of it. There’s really no soul beyond the basics.
The book’s lack of soul or passion in narrative drags things along from plot point to plot point with plenty of room for the requisite facts, but there doesn’t seem to be much of a joy in storytelling here. Nowhere is this more evident than the sex scene between Jacob and Marlena. The two have been longing for each other for quite some time. She has been abused by August and he’s had to put up with it. Now the two are together and... there really isn’t any passion in the narrative. Love scenes are notoriously difficult to bring to the page, but there’s definitely something missing here. While Gruen copiously avoids being too clinical or too tacky, she never manages to render the emotions in anything other than the most basic primary colors. It’s a problem that plagues the rest of the book as well.
The Movie
In principle, Francis Lawrence’s Water For Elephants covers the exact same ground as the book. The story is fluently truncated from the extended length of the book into a simple two-hour film courtesy of screenwriter Richard LaGravenese (The Horse Whisperer, The Mirror Has Two Faces.)
Robert Pattinson, of course, stars as Jacob, the veterinary student who finds he has fallen on hard times. Pattinson does a pretty good job with the basic mechanics of acting, but beyond the surface, there appears to be a great emotional vacuum. It’s not like he isn’t actually going through the emotions onscreen — he is. There isn’t enough in his performance to suggest that those emotions feel very genuine. The vacuous Pattinson is likeable enough, but there’s kind of a dead feeling about him that never seems to go away even when he’s supposed to be truly enjoying himself as Jacob. It’s a bit frustrating.
Reese Witherspoon plays his love interest, Marlena. As expected, the romance plays out a little less awkwardly onscreen. If Hollywood cinema consistently does one thing remarkably well, it’s romance. The problem may be that we don’t really get enough time between Pattinson and Witherspoon to really develop much of a connection between the two of them. The romance feels very natural on the big screen, but it’s not a very engrossing one. Pattinson’s emotionally hollow screen presence doesn’t have much to connect with against an equally vacant Witherspoon. It’s not a bad screen romance, but other, more peripheral characters come across as being much more interesting than the central two.
With a guy who cut his teeth on music videos directing the film, one might expect the circus itself to splash itself across the cinema screen with the kind of passion that would capture the wonder and spectacle of a touring circus during the great depression. One would expect dramatic visuals that would deliver that same sense of wonder to a modern cinema audience. And one would be immensely disappointed. There’s no question that the period of the circus is painstakingly rendered onscreen with as much authentic detail as possible, but the camera doesn’t capture any of the wonder of it all. The dazzling wonder of the circus from that era — the spectacle that is at the heart of what made circuses so appealing for previous generations - is completely missing here. As a result, Francis Lawrence’s film brings Gruen’s novel to the screen with remarkable fidelity right down to the bland, yawn-inducing presentation of an early 20th century circus.
With respect to the plot, much has been cut out to expedite delivery of all the major story elements. Perhaps the biggest absence felt onscreen is that of the character of Uncle Al. The film completely eliminates this character in favor of a typically brilliant Christopher Waltz as August — who also serves as the head of the circus in the film. There’s some really classy depth to Waltz’s performance, which goes a long way towards making the movie likeable. He’s a villain, yes, but a satisfyingly pathetic one with an affable side. He’s taken Gruen’s relatively weak character and made him a bit more interesting.
Things proceed pretty much the way they do in the novel with the exception of all the pointless little bits of narrative about an aging Jacob in the modern world. Here, the aging Jacob scenes bookend the story without intruding on the story beyond intro and ending scenes. Hal Holbrook plays an older Jacob with considerable humanity and genuine emotion. With a career stretching back to the mid-1960s, Holbrook knows how to deliver a deeply emotional, heartfelt performance that is onscreen for only the briefest period of time.
The Verdict
With LaGravenese’s script being a really tight, economical adaptation of Gruen’s book, it’s quite fitting (though no less disappointing) that the movie would be as bad as the book (albeit in different ways for different reasons.) Neither seem animated by much interest in telling an actual story. Both appear to have been projects for the sake of developing work. Many will read the book for the sake of reading a book. Many will see the film for the sake of seeing a film. Anyone expecting any more than that out of either will be grossly disappointed.