Looking over my sizable collection of DVDs...amongst the
dramas, comedies, musicals, thrillers, adventures, horror films, and even
documentaries; I note there to be a conspicuous paucity of four distinct genres
of film: war movies, sports films, westerns, and science fiction. I’ve really not a single
war film (Doctor Zhivago coming
closest); only one western - the original True Grit, unless you count Doris Day’s Calamity Jane; and sports weigh in exclusively with Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. My sole concession to the
field of science fiction is François Truffaut’s flawed, but nonetheless splendid adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. One of the very few science fiction films I really enjoy, perhaps due to the fact that it was made by a man who had gone on record
as not being particularly fond of science fiction films himself.
Julie Christie as Linda Montag |
Oskar Werner as Guy Montag |
Julie Christie as Clarisse McClellan |
Cyril Cusack as The Captain |
Anton Diffring as Fabian |
The Fireman of Fahrenheit 451, on their way to a book burning |
Bradbury’s book is a political allegory, more sociological in bent, commenting on the dangers of censorship and threats to independent thought. Truffaut’s film is more personal in scope. Something akin to being the literary companion to both his 1973 valentine to the movies: Day for Night, and his 1980 paean to theater: The Last Metro; Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 speaks to the filmmaker’s love of books and reading. It's not so much a sci-fi film as a Grimm fairy tale about a nowhere man who finds himself by getting lost in the written word.
I derive a great deal of pleasure from both artists' approach to the material, and find that looking to the many ways in which the film deviates from Bradbury’s themes or corrupt the author’s intentions is a perfect way to both court frustration and blind oneself to the unique pleasures of Truffaut’s film.
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT
THIS FILM
Perhaps my favorite thing about Fahrenheit 451 is Truffaut’s dogged
resistance to meeting and satisfying the genre expectations of science fiction. In a
1970 interview with film critic Charles Thomas Samuels, Truffaut expressed his
disinterest in science fiction and claimed to have felt no affinity for the
novel’s political metaphor. Truffaut chose instead to construct an allegory
about a closed-off, dissatisfied man who comes to fall in love with life,
mankind, and himself, when he embarks on an epiphanic discovery of books and
reading. For me, this is a brilliant tact on Truffaut's part, one which may have disappointed many fans of the novel, but saves Fahrenheit 451 from being just another sci-fi film with socio-political subtext. Truffaut's disinterest in politics increases the human interest levels in Bradbury's story in much the same way Roman Polanski's agnosticism helped bring a stronger emotional/psychological emphasis to Rosemary Baby.
In the visual, hyper-literal language of film, I think it would have been unwise to emphasize those political elements of Fahrenheit 451 which are so obviously stated, underlined, and emphasized in the plot itself. Truffaut avoids overstatement and didacticism by letting the film’s agenda regarding fascism, repression, and censorship play out in the background…reserving his foreground focus for the characters and the human drama.
In the visual, hyper-literal language of film, I think it would have been unwise to emphasize those political elements of Fahrenheit 451 which are so obviously stated, underlined, and emphasized in the plot itself. Truffaut avoids overstatement and didacticism by letting the film’s agenda regarding fascism, repression, and censorship play out in the background…reserving his foreground focus for the characters and the human drama.
Fahrenheit 451 marks
my 6th post for a Julie Christie film, so by now, most visitors to
this blog know the drill: a brief introduction to the character followed by a
paragraph or two of gushing, fawning, thoroughly over-the-top (yet
not-unwarranted) admiration for the iconic sixties actress. All unencumbered by neutral, objective appraisal. And as Christie assays a dual role in Fahrenheit 451 (Time Magazine-
“…it strongly supports the widely held suspicion that [Julie Christie] cannot
actually act. Though she plays two women of diametrically divergent
dispositions, they seem in her portrayal to differ only in their hairdos"), it
affords twice the opportunity for unbridled fandom.
I'll make it brief. Cinematographer Nicolas Roeg, working with Christie for the first time (they would collaborate several times more in the future) makes her look positively stunning no matter which character she plays. Lastly, she's a major asset to the film and its lifeblood despite never really getting as strong a grasp on the Clarisse role as that of Linda...a character who has more than a few things in common with Darling's Diana Scott.
I'll make it brief. Cinematographer Nicolas Roeg, working with Christie for the first time (they would collaborate several times more in the future) makes her look positively stunning no matter which character she plays. Lastly, she's a major asset to the film and its lifeblood despite never really getting as strong a grasp on the Clarisse role as that of Linda...a character who has more than a few things in common with Darling's Diana Scott.
Cyril Cusack is charming, paternal, and ultimately terrifying as the doctrine-spouting Chief of firemen. |
By this, I mean that I've never taken it to be a literal fact that two complete strangers in Montag's life are perfectly identical women. Rather, I've always held the belief that it is only Montag who sees them as identical. Montag responds to the similarities between Clarisse and Linda (“She’s rather like you, except her hair is long”) and sees them as twin halves of the same person. The intellectual and spiritual/the unimpassioned and superficial. This is not, however, consistent with Bradbury’s vision. In the book, Clarisse is a teenager and different from Linda in every way...but the duality fits Truffaut's more personality-based interpretation of Fahrenheit 451. I like to think that the Clarisse and Montag we see at the end of the film are a vision of what Linda and Guy were before their senses and passions were dulled by suppression and conformity.
THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Fahrenheit 451 is
marvelously devoid of the usual futuristic hardware fetish I find so stultifying
in most science fiction movies. The film presents futuristic progress as boring, workaday and banal; which is somehow always what seems to happen with technology. The fact that the internet—the most
revolutionary invention for the gathering of sharing of information—is chiefly used as a tool for bullying, bickering, and pornography, is proof enough that
technology always surrenders to the inalienable fact that people obstinately remain no more than human in the face of the most incredible technological advances.
Vertigo.
THE STUFF OF DREAMS
At the start of this essay, I stated that I think Fahrenheit 451 is a splendid but flawed Truffaut
effort. Its chief flaw, as I see it, being that a film about people benumbed and
rendered passionless due to the oppressiveness of a totalitarian society, risks
being the very thing it hopes to dramatize. In reference to the 1996 film Fargo, a critic (Pauline
Kael, perhaps) made the very good point that even an excellent movie about moronic people is
still ultimately a film about moronic people, and therefore one not easily endured, no matter its proficiency.
François Truffaut (who didn't speak English and whose first and only English language film this is) does a great job of finding photogenically bland, cold landscapes in which to play out his drama, and he takes some real chances in intentionally asking for stilted, sometimes robotic performances from his actors. While all of this is consistent with the theme of the story, it is deadly to entertainment. If Fahrenheit 451 suffers at all, it is from a lack of blood coursing through its veins. In focusing so effectively on the aspects of the plot demonstrating the spiritually deadening effects of an oppressive society, Truffaut fails to arrive at a satisfactory way of conveying what is at stake and what stands to be lost when people are deprived of the freedom to think. Without some sense of life's vitality expressed somewhere on the screen, there just seems to be something elemental lacking in the depiction of the life-changing effect books and reading can have on the human spirit.
François Truffaut (who didn't speak English and whose first and only English language film this is) does a great job of finding photogenically bland, cold landscapes in which to play out his drama, and he takes some real chances in intentionally asking for stilted, sometimes robotic performances from his actors. While all of this is consistent with the theme of the story, it is deadly to entertainment. If Fahrenheit 451 suffers at all, it is from a lack of blood coursing through its veins. In focusing so effectively on the aspects of the plot demonstrating the spiritually deadening effects of an oppressive society, Truffaut fails to arrive at a satisfactory way of conveying what is at stake and what stands to be lost when people are deprived of the freedom to think. Without some sense of life's vitality expressed somewhere on the screen, there just seems to be something elemental lacking in the depiction of the life-changing effect books and reading can have on the human spirit.
But I’m a sucker for movies about
emotional and spiritual transformations (virtually ANY version A Christmas Carol can easily reduce me
to tears by the end), so I find myself moved—perhaps unaccountably so, given
the film’s cool presentation—by the awakening of Guy Montag to the miracle of
books. Oskar Werner's scenes discovering the written word, specifically the sequence in which he tries to make sense of a woman who'd rather die than be separated from her books, are sensitively rendered and unexpectedly moving.
As a teen, I retreated into books as
a means of coping with my crippling shyness. As an adult, I'm happy that my onetime escapist
immersion into the written word has blossomed into an appreciation of the way
books actually serve to expand one’s world. I love libraries, old bookstores, and
the heft, weight, and texture of books. So much so, in fact, that I don’t know if I’ll ever be able surrender to the practicality of e-books and electronic
readers. While on that topic: there is something very Ray Bradbury-ish in naming an electronic device (one poised to replace books and paper-printed literature), a
Kindle and Kindle Fire. I understand the name is intentional, but, boy!...in these anti-intellectual times, talk
about Bradbury’s book-burning future coming to pass!
Montag finds his bliss |