right—have been made from Shakespeare’s plays,
and producers continue to find imaginative ways of
bringing other literary classics (e.g., Beowulfor The
Iliad) to the screen. In the last few years alone, cin-
ematic adaptations have been made of the works of
such distinguished writers as Raymond Carver
(Jindabyne, 2006; director: Ray Lawrence), Ian
McEwan (Atonement, 2007; director: Joe Wright),
Philip K. Dick (A Scanner Darkly, 2006; director:
Richard Linklater), Gabriel García Márquez (Love
in the Time of Cholera, 2007; director: Mike Newell),
D. H. Lawrence (Lady Chatterley, 2006; director:
Pascale Ferran), and, of course, Shakespeare.
Today, publishers of all kinds are bringing their
books to the screen by forming partnerships with
movie production companies. For example, Marvel
Comics has done this in order to retain aesthetic
and financial control over its characters and sto-
ries, such as those in Jon Favreau’s Iron Man
movies. This gives them a larger share of the
money paid for film rights, as well as a larger cut of
the box-office sales, and additional revenues from
DVDs, cable TV, and other media. Authors whose
books are adapted under these partnerships also
have more influence on choosing the screenwriters
and even actors.
Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy
(2001–3), while faithful to the spirit of J. R. R.
Tolkien’s novels, is very different from the books;
movies are, by their nature, different from the
books on which they are based. Jackson’s trilogy is
a lavish visual interpretation of Tolkien’s literary
vision, and thus its mythical world is different from
the one each of us imagines as we read those books.
Jackson relies heavily on action scenes, which
are exciting, and special effects, which are won-
drous. And he had to eliminate or combine certain
characters and details in order to manage the
vast amount of source material. However, it is
the ending—as happy a Hollywood ending as in
The Wizard of Oz—that challenges us. You are no
doubt familiar enough with quest movies to expect
that, in the end, the good protagonist will defeat the
evil antagonist and that the hero’s quest will reach
a satisfactory conclusion. In contrast to Tolkien’s
much darker and more pessimistic ending, that is
exactly what happens in Jackson’s version. In the
movie’s last segment, Frodo continues his journey
as he boards a ship with his mentors and sails away,
and Sam returns to find that the shire is almost
exactly as he left it, just as Dorothy finds Kansas
pretty much as she left it. We assume that Sam
will live “happily ever after,” the conclusion of all
fairy tales.Order
Bringing order to the plot events is one of the most
fundamental decisions that filmmakers make about
relaying story information through the plot. UnlikeNarrative form and the biopicA biographical movie, or
biopic, provides particularly rich opportunities to ask why the
filmmakers chose to tell the story the way they did. After all,
the facts of the main character’s life are objectively verifiable
and follow a particular order. But storytellers’ shaping of the
material, the form that the facts take, determines how
compelling the movie is dramatically, how interesting it is
cinematically, and what it ultimately means.
Movie audiences love boxing movies, such as Clint
Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby(2004), Martin Scorsese’s
Raging Bull(1980), and David O. Russell’s The Fighter(2010;
screenwriters: Scott Silver, Paul Tamsay, and Eric Johnson), a
boxing drama based on the true story of Micky Ward (Mark
Wahlberg) and his brother Dicky (Christian Bale). The
narrative relies on facts about their upbringing in a working-
class Boston neighborhood, their manipulation by a scheming
mother-cum-manager (Melissa Leo), and most spectacularly,
Dicky’s descent into crack cocaine addiction and eventual
imprisonment. Dicky——once a champion, and then Micky’s
trainer——is now a loser and an obstacle to his brother’s
success in the ring. On his own, Micky comes from behind
and becomes a winner, but by recounting the almost
simultaneous fall of his brother, the screenwriters have
chosen a darker way to tell the story. The Fighterencourages
us to analyze this narrative choice: Is the conflict between
the brothers central to Micky’s eventual winning of a
welterweight title?
ELEMENTS OF NARRATIVE 145