The Adaptation of Mordecai Richler

This is unfair, no doubt, to the movies themselves, especially those that concentrate on capturing the emotional essence of the novel — the most, perhaps, that can be expected. As well, directors love trying to adapt literary works, and movie watchers love viewing films based on books that have meant much to them. In a 2006 Guardian poll of the fifty greatest movie adaptations, some thirty-five of the source texts could be considered literary in nature, with To Kill a Mockingbird and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest topping the list. Over the next year, Canadian readers will get to watch not only Mordecai Richler on television, but also Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Englishman’s Boy. Big-screen versions of Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces and Matt Cohen’s Emotional Arithmetic both premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The failure to get the movie of St. Urbain’s Horseman off the ground in the early 1970s had no effect on Richler’s decision to stick with the template he had created for the novel. Joshua Then and Now, Solomon Gursky Was Here, and Barney’s Version display the same qualities, and while they make for sophisticated, rewarding books, none is a likely candidate to be one of those miracles. (Joshua was a partial connect, at best, despite a cast that included James Woods and Alan Arkin.)

Richler understood that what made literary fiction unique is nearly impossible to transcribe onto celluloid. But he also knew from his efforts with Room at the Top and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz that occasionally the result was still pretty terrific. So he got involved when opportunity allowed, doing the writing and cashing the cheques and probably keeping his hopes low. Then he returned to his real work, the work he was born to do, and tried like any serious novelist to block out everything else, including the admittedly loud background noise of books being optioned and scripts commissioned and movies maybe, just maybe, getting made.