Faithful In All The Wrong Ways

Isabel Allende’s The House Of Spirits is an incredible novel. A magical, surreal, multi-generational saga, a true tour-de-force that made me laugh and also cry, disturbed me at times, and at other times delighted me. It’s one of the most emotionally charged books I’ve ever read, and on top of that it intertwines with real history in fascinating ways.

As just a synopsis, it appears to follow in the footsteps of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece One Hundred Years Of Solitude, but the story itself does not feel like an imitation on any level. It borrows the basic narrative layout of 100 Years, and then completely does its own thing. House of Spirits succeeds in being both an emulation of another masterpiece, as well as being a unique masterpiece in its own right.

After reading House Of Spirits, I thought about how it would be nearly impossible to adapt into a movie or a TV series. The novel plays with time in a way that I don’t think can translate to film, at least not without exceptionally clever directing and editing.

Furthermore, the huge cast of characters would be very difficult to balance or to condense, especially with how the story stretches out over a long time span.

So it came as quite a surprise when I discovered that there is in fact a film adaptation of House Of Spirits, made not so long after the book was first published. It even has an all-star cast: Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons, Antonio Banderas, Wynona Rider, among others.

I figured there was no way it could be good, but in the interest of science I had to find out. So I convinced my wife to watch the whole three hours of it with me, and then we evaluated it, and between two of us we came to the conclusion that… no, no it’s not very good :(

There are tons of bad novel-to-film adaptations out there, but what’s interesting about this one is it failed for the opposite reasons as most bad adaptations:

Rather than changing too much and losing the soul of the story by forcing it into a Hollywood formula, the House Of Spirits movie followed the book as closely as could be achieved within the three hour runtime, but in so doing totally lost its soul anyway.

Almost every major plot point is in there, and in the same order, almost all of the characters are unchanged and follow the same arcs as in they do in the novel. Other than cutting a few minor characters, the biggest change made by the film was to condense two of the main characters, a mother and daughter, into one single character.

And while combining them makes sense from an efficiency perspective, the problem now is that the historical timing of the generations gets all warped. Clara and Esteban grew up before cars and airplanes were around, but their daughter is somehow in her mid-twenties during the military coup of ‘73?

What makes this confusing timeline even worse is that I got the feeling the director wanted the movie to feel like one of those old classic wartime epics, and so we get the coup of ‘73 portrayed like World War 2 Europe, rather than Latin America in the ‘70s.

On the same note, the whole look of the movie is off. It doesn’t look or feel like Chile at any point, and indeed they filmed the whole thing in Portugal and in Denmark for some reason. Really the movie didn’t capture any of the Latin atmosphere or the Latin vibes that are so strong in the novel.

And going along with that classic wartime epic problem, the film sucked out all the humor. The book is full of humor, even in some of its dark moments, and that’s one of the essential things that make it so good, the way it balances tragedy with humor.

But the film refuses to make light of anything, always doubling down on its heavy-handed tone, and outright excluding some of the best moments of the book for being too comical.

This ends up being a major flaw, because the relentless drama with no relief means that the truly dark moments don’t stand out the way they should. It’s a movie with no charm, unlike the book which is actually fun, this is just grim.

The actors’ performances are quite good, I think, but unfortunately come in service of a soulless production. The film wanted to do justice to the plot and the characters of the novel, but not to the story’s beating heart of Chilean culture and history, which killed the movie’s spirit before it even started.

In short, this extremely faithful adaptation did not stay faithful in the places where it really counted. Independent of its source material, it’s not exactly a bad film, just a very long, overly serious, and ultimately unsatisfying one.

Even before seeing this movie, I was quite apprehensive about the prospect of a One Hundred Years Of Solitude movie, which is already in the making. Now I’m downright against it. Please, don’t do this again, just stop.

But what do you think? Have you read The House of Spirits? Have you seen the movie? Should some adaptations be illegal? Let me know in the comments!

Thanks for reading,

Gibbles