The Adaptation of Mordecai Richler

The three-hour miniseries St. Urbain’s Horseman, directed by Peter Moss from a script credited to three writers, airs over two nights in September on cbc. Working from a budget of $7.4 million and shot entirely in Montreal, with black cabs and red telephone booths rendering street corners a faux-London circa 1966, the film is obliged to make tough calls about what it has the leisure and cash to shoot. Large chunks of the novel are abandoned to firm up the story’s foundations. Pillars include the teen Jake’s myth-forging encounters with his cousin Joey, his wooing and wedding of his great love, Nancy Croft, and his foolish attraction to the nefarious Harry Stein, an error that ends with them both on trial.

Though these decisions obliged cutting several trenchant scenes, including a baseball game on London’s Hampstead Heath between film executives, the trimming allows for a clean narrative and a manageable cast. One hundred and eighty minutes of movie may seem plenty, but St. Urbain’s Horseman could use twice the time. If the screenwriters needed guidance or consolation for their cuts, they had only to glance through the drafts of Richler’s own scripts, available in his archives at the University of Calgary.

In one set of notes to his producers, Richler jokes that this latest draft will be between fifty and 150 pages in length, a difference of nearly two hours. He planned to include no fewer than seventy-four scenes from the novel, along with a voice-over that would, by amplifying Jake Hersh’s complex character, especially his fantasies and fears, hint at the tone of the prose.

Montreal’s Galafilm, which produced the miniseries, and Peter Moss also put much thought into what they could extract from their source material. They disavow the book’s shifting storytelling mode, grouping the Montreal material together after an opening that lays out Jake’s legal dilemma in London. Giving thirty minutes to St. Urbain Street, the most celebrated urban landscape in Canadian literature, was surely an easy call. It is a delight to see Richler’s nostalgia for the sights, smells, and tastes of his vanished village rendered visual. The same is true of the minor comedic characters that crowd his novels. Veteran actors Elliott Gould and Andrea Martin dutifully own their moments, often mouthing dialogue lifted straight from the novel, while Michael Riley comes close to stealing the show as the darkly amoral Stein.

Staying close, perhaps, to the axiom that since film adaptations can do justice to a novel’s story and characters, they shouldn’t be shy about doing so to the max, Moss opts for high gloss in his leads. David Julian Hirsh, who plays Jake, and the British actress Selina Giles, who plays Nancy, are both beautiful people. She is meant to be; he, less so. Happily, Hirsh is an adroit actor and dulls his sheen with enough bite and uncertainty to make it plausible that his character would commit such errors. Moss directs their romance with economy and charm, and though the film is consumed in its final hour with the trial, it still manages to suggest a love and a life together under strain. Add to those complexities an effort to explore the elusive horseman motif — did Richler mean it to represent the Jewish imagination haunted by the Holocaust? Or is it an emblem of Jake’s unease with how history seemed to bypass his generation? — and you have an honourable attempt to film a sprawling novel.

More than any dropped scenes, what is missing from Peter Moss’s film is, in effect, Mordecai Richler’s voice. This is no surprise. Reading a literary novel isn’t akin to permitting a stranger into your head. It is more like first inviting him or her inside and then forgetting you have a chattering guest. This melding of the voice of the writer and the reader can be difficult, especially with novels that make no obvious effort to include you in the monologue. But once it is complete, the journey through the narrative is intense and intimate, the more so for the effort involved. That Richler’s voice, for all its fearsome wit and bracing moral intelligence, isn’t especially intimidating doesn’t ensure that it will translate easily onto screen.

Then there is the matter of how we experience novels versus films. A book is usually read in segments, a half-hour here and there, with time in between to succumb to the dream of it. Authorial asides, marginal scenes and minor characters, even flights of prose, don’t seem intrusive when encountered in this manner. Quite the opposite: these passages, suggestive of a pleasingly meandering dialogue, often cement an intense encounter with that intimate voice.

Films, by contrast, besides having their own storytelling methods to establish and reveries to share, are under severe time pressures. They have around two hours to make their magic work, or else. While Elia Kazan’s response to the problem of adapting John Steinbeck’s East of Eden remains extreme — the director wound up filming just over a quarter of the book — filmmakers are not necessarily being insensitive or boorish when they start trimming away at the text. They may just be trying to put on screen what the screen can comfortably manage.

One truism of the movie industry is that genre books, lacking that formidable voice, are easier to adapt. Directors get the plot and characters they need to construct a visual narrative and are spared having to compete with the author for, in a sense, creative control. Books and films may be the two great storytelling mediums, but when brought together, someone still has to be in charge. Since movies made from literary novels generally can’t translate the voice regardless, why bother trying?

The results tend to be adaptations that seem to fail to “get” the novel. Everyone has a list of exceptions, and they are all small cinematic miracles. But for each improbable transference there are a few partial connects and a dozen outright broken lines. John Le Carré once complained that having one of his books turned into a film was like seeing an ox turned into bouillon cubes.