Canterville Ghost - a review

I watched the 2000 remake of The Canterville Ghost last night. A very pretty production - nice costumes, rich settings, good acting. Such a pity the person who wrote the script didn't realize what the story is about.

Oh, they got the surface right - vulgar American family buys haunted British mansion; hilarity ensues when the ghost and the family try to run each other out. But that's not what the story is really about. It's really about cultural adaptation. The Americans are impetuous, impulsive, oblivious to tradition, and advertising oriented, yes... but their energy, optimism, and unflagging determination are routing the British at every turn. The resolution comes when they find common ground.

But this production, oddly, turns the whole thing into a love story about the American daughter, who is taught the meaning of love by the mournful, romantic ghost. A nice trick, considering that the daughter's love life got one sentence in the original story and the ghost murdered his wife. (The scriptwriter blows off that inconvenient fact with a my-last-duchess story of a regretted fit of unsubstantiated jealousy.) Left behind along with the point is much of the wit. The terrible twins are sidelined to occasional comic relief instead of driving the story and my favorite bit of shtick, the multicolored blood stain, is completely removed. (The Americans keep cleaning up Lady Canterville's bloodstain; the ghost resorts to raiding paint boxes to refresh it and when he runs out of reds he uses whatever color he can find.) Instead of a hilarious story of culture clashes, we get a lugubrious, formulaic woo-by-numbers love story. Boy meets girl. Girl teaches boy that class differences don't matter. Girl leaves boy thinking he's a fortune hunter. Boy proves he's rich. Boy and girl marry.

Snoozer!


And while I'm complaining about movies, how come I saw months of advertisement for the new DVD of Aladdin, but only found out last night that the DVD of Mulan, my favorite Disney movie, is coming out the day after my birthday? And I would find this out right *after* I made an Amazon order.

Pretentious thoughts on literary themes - aka, I hate this book I'm reviewing! (again)

I've pretty much made up my mind about a book by page 20 and this one is so slow it's putting my fillings to sleep. So far we've seen a little girl wake her family up, the mother announce she's pregnant again, the kids go outside and play, the father hide in his study, and everyone poke at dinner. Page 19, and that's it for the action. The rest of the space is taken up with what everyone thinks about it all and how they feel about each other (vaguely resentful).

Guess I'm one of the crew, because I hate 'em all too.

Thing is, it's not because the writing's so bad - it isn't. Oh, it's turgid and all, but it's a prime example of a literary movement I've decided to dub "70s Sociopathy." Remember books and movies like The Graduate, Virgin Suicides, Separate Peace? They were all the same - such boring people leading such boring lives that they're all clinically depressed, and they're so pathologically self-centered that they blame everyone around them for their stultification. I remember when such things were considered "edgy" and "real" because they "peeled back the artifice" - but if you take a closer look, who was REALLY the cause of everyone's misery? Themselves. They never talked - excuse me, were "unable to communicate" - and they were so empty that even they couldn't figure who they were, and had to go "find themselves" as if their personality had gone out for a gallon of milk and never come home.

Everyone blames every other person in the world for limiting them, trapping them, not dedicating their lives to entertaining and sustaining them. Caught without empathy but with plenty of resentment, whatever dirt one person does to another becomes ennobled, because it is somehow striking back at the oppressor. (The Graduate is a really classic example of this. Everyone finds their only gratification in hurting someone else - the circle shit instead of the circle jerk.)

At the end of the book or movie, some people might be dead and maybe even one or two have had a lesson hammered home with such a big clue-by-four that it made a shallow dent in their concrete self-absorption, but the rest of the cast is just left with the eternal, unanswered question of "how did it get to be about anyone else when the world is all about me?"

This particular book - nameless because it will eventually be reviewed - is theoretically a private detective novel, although we have yet to see crime or detective. Instead, we have passages like these:

"Amelia, dreamy and languid with the heat, lay on her back on the scorched grass and fired earth of the lawn, staring up at the endless, cloudless blue, pierced only by the giant hollyhocks that grew like weeds in the garden. She watched the reckless, sky-diving swallows and listened to the pleasing buzz and hum of the insect world. A ladybird crawled across the freckled skin of her arm. A hot air balloon drifted lazily overhead and she wished she could be bothered to wake Sylvia and tell her about it."

or

"But one thing was true - Victor would be nothing without her, but he was also nothing with her. At that very moment he was toiling in the cool dark of his study, the heavy chenille curtains closed against the summer, lost in his work, work with never came to fruition, never changed the world or made his name. He was not great in his field, merely good. This gave her a certain satisfaction."

Get a life, people!

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( The Reader Meme )