Tots to Teens, Star Mag
13 August 2006
When screen characters fall short
I HAVE only just discovered that Nicole Kidman is to play Mrs Coulter in the film based on Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights (I believe it will be released as The Golden Compass, the title of the American edition of the first book in Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy).
I don’t think it is bad casting. Kidman is suitably icily beautiful. Imagine if the part had been given to Melanie Griffiths!
There’s always the risk of being thoroughly disappointed by the actors employed to play the characters in books we love. Most readers will have their own mental images of characters in a novel. At times they are guided by the author’s description, at others by the illustrations, or a combination of both. Even if the writer is not the sort who dwells on physical details, the characters will come to vivid life through their actions, motives and words.
My idea of the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was based on a combination of Pauline Baynes’s illustrations and C.S. Lewis’s description and characterisation. It did not match Tilda Swinton’s portrayal in last year’s film of the book.
Tilda Swinton as the White Witch in last year’s film version of C.S. Lewis’ ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’.
My White Witch is a raven-haired beauty, full of terrifying yet careless majesty. She fights like a savage, not like she’s performing a ritualistic dance. She is full of passionate fury and blind rage, not cold and calculative. Her furs aren’t out of some posh shop on Bond Street (as Swinton’s seemed to be), but harvested from beasts she’s killed herself. And I doubt she would be bothered with a costume change every time she stepped out of her castle.
Swinton may well have lived up to someone else’s expectations, but she fell way short of mine.
It’s bound to happen when it’s a book you care about. Surely no producer’s ideas of who should play whom will fit your own exactly. And it’s really safer not to watch the movie when you consider that the scriptwriter will surely have taken liberties with the plot or put the most preposterous lines in your favourite characters’ mouths! I have yet to get over Gimli being turned into a figure of fun in The Lord of the Rings films and I am not even very fond of the books!
This is why I have avoided, like the plague, the film adaptation of A.S. Byatt’s Possession (one of my all-time favourite novels), which stars Gwyneth Paltrow. Oh, I just had a thought! What if she had been cast as Mrs Coulter ... (Shudder!)
Pauline Baynes’ illustration. Which comes closer to your idea of the character? |
Sometimes it hardly matters that the actor looks nothing like the author’s description of the character. For example, I didn’t mind one jot when Winona Ryder played Jo March in the 1995 film version of Little Women. Her hair is most certainly not Ryder’s “one beauty”, but I rather liked that Jo, my favourite March sister (isn’t she everyone’s?), should look quite lovely.
I don't care who acts in the Harry Potter movies because although I have read the books, I’ve not formed more than a vague idea of the characters. (Anyway, those who can’t be bothered with books sometimes fall back on the movie versions, but I find the live-action Harry Potters even more annoying and have only watched the first one. Even then I fell asleep halfway through.)
Despite loving His Dark Materials and having precise ideas of the characters, I don’t think I shall be able to resist watching The Golden Compass. At least, the girl who has been chosen to play Lyra is unknown. Imagine Lindsay Lohan or Hilary Duff in the role!
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