Agent 99 - Online story telling

I finally caught up with Notes from a Scandal in movie form after finishing the book quite a while ago. The book is superior, and it's worth quickly going back and looking at the intriguing 'narrator position' of the book, which is the key to figuring out why this is case of 'book over film'.

The Book

In the book the protagonist and the narrator are the same person. It's quite a simple conceit the story of the scandal is told as a part of the story of the entrapment. The over-riding arc is about a vampire claiming a victim during which the story of the victims vistimisation of another victim(!) presents the vampire with the opportunites to do her thing. Note that the story (but not the telling) is simple and covers the stalking and devouring of prey by a monster.

What makes the whole thing excellent is that narrative position - a person of evil is writing the diaries - means that the game at the level of the telling of the story is the game between the reader and the narrator where the readerdiscovers the narrators true nature despite her self-written position as Shebas' friend: The whole works at the level of the psychological thriller with an anti-hero as protagonist.

In the capable hands of Heller this is a quite delicate, 'intelligent' (by which I mean self-aware) and witty thriller that probes the heart of envy. Delicious.

The movie

The movie shifts the whole thing around quite substantially:

The narrator loses their exclusive access to controlling the story: As soon as we move from her narrative frame we have two tellers - the character/narrator and the writer/director. This happens quite early on in the movie, at the point where we show Shebas' involvement with the boy.

The genre shifts: The film is not a psychological thriller. It almost is, but the (admittedly late) revelation that Sheba goes back to her family makes Sheba the protagonist: She is the one that changes, that learns and grows. In the book she is a pure victim, in the movie she is the central character.

So in the movie we get the protagonisits story told by the antagonist and the film-maker. Which waters things down and takes away the delicious play of the novel.

This is not to say there are no pleasures in the film - the scene where they spat on the street about whether or not Sheeba can comfort her after cat has died is really great, but the main pleasure of the book is gone: We know from very early on what Denchs' character is - and in fact Marber has invented a whole back story (Jennifer) to make sure we get it (ker-click).

What would I do?

It's certainly a very difficult problem to turn 'Notes' into a film. Follow the genre and tone of the book and you just can't leave Denchs' side: There would be no scenes of bonking behind the railway yards, you would only be able to go there vicariously through Sheba's confessions in her company. Being 'true to the piece' would probably work best as a theatrical monologue - but that's commercial suicide :-) Commercial reality demands that the Sheba character is made sympathetic and you are going to be working very hard to get a star like Cate Blanchett to play a victim with no 'redemption moment', no matter how well (and I think she was perfect, don't get me wrong).

So the choices are hard here: Make Sheba the protagonist and the narrator and maybe you are moving too far away from the novel, stay too close to the novel and it becomes very art-house. Trying to chart the road of the novel, where the surface is and emotion is boutique but underneath is pure thriller, is going to be almost impossible in the movie.

I would have preferred the movie to avoid the 'redemption moment' and delay the ambiguity of the trap for a lot longer. All the other things - character, detailing etc I thought was handled very well indeed - but it's a bit like Grandfathers axe: Is it the same axe if it has three new heads and two new handles??