Book-based films can be successful

In one of the first film courses I took in college, the instructor kept repeating one thing over and over: A movie is a movie, and a book is a book.

It’s a simple concept. How, after all, do you put all 824 pages of “The Brothers Karamazov” on film?

If you’re director Richard Brooks, you pare Dostoevsky’s massive novel down to a film that is slightly less than 2 1/2 hours long. And in the process you make something that Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader described this way: “While not as terrible as his subsequent adaptation of ‘Lord Jim,’ this 1958 Hollywoodization of the Dostoevsky novel by writer-director Richard Brooks is pretty grotesque all the same.”

“Hollywoodization” is the perfect word for a movie that attempts to portray 19th century Russia with a cast that includes William Shatner, better known to “Star Trek” fans as Capt. James T. (“In This Episode I Get to Take Off My Shirt”) Kirk.

Yet clearly the literal can become the visual. Some books tell their stories in ways that are nearly purely cinematic.

A good example is Norman Maclean’s memoir “A River Runs Through It.” Just read the book and you can see how easy it would be to incorporate the title story into a narrative that includes the two shorter pieces – fly-fishing, logging, gambling, family relations and fly-fishing again. The movie that I see in my head seems … perfect.

When Robert Redford made the movie, two years after Maclean’s death in 1990, it seemed almost as if he had read a different book. To paraphrase Rosenbaum, Redford “Hollywoodized” Maclean’s story by adding a sense of the maudlin that would have choked the longtime University of Chicago writing instructor.

Bathos to Maclean was what a submerged log is to a fisherman – something that just gets in the way.

There are times, though, in which a book seems impossible to film. Take, for example, “Porte Aperte,” which is Italian for “Open Doors” (VHS; 1:48; rated R for violence, sexuality). Released the same year that Maclean died, the film by Italian director Gianni Amelio is based on a 72-page novella by Sicilian novelist Leonardo Sciascia.

To say that “Open Doors” isn’t a mainstream American film would be like saying that “American Pie” shouldn’t be shown in church. It’s slow and somber, and it explores weighty themes – capital punishment, fascism and the dictates of personal conscience – in a way that never comes to an easy conclusion. It forces you to see the gray areas between dueling dogmas.

And, oh, the film’s central character, veteran Italian actor Gian Maria Volonté … well, he’s to Brad Pitt what Dame Judi Dench is to Gwyneth Paltrow (imagine an Italian Randolph Scott).

Despite all this, or maybe because of it, “Porte Aperte” is mesmerizing. Shot in and around novelist Sciascia’s home, Palermo, Italy, the movie, which is set in 1937, begins with a man methodically and brutally murdering three people – the final one his wife. Director Amelio, by way of Sciascia, uses the crime as a way of asking the obvious question: Is there a crime so bad that it obligates the state to execute the offender?

Sciascia’s novella suggests that the cry for the death of a man the public calls “the Monster of Palermo” is hypocritical. Public officials want the execution to take place because it’s always good business to appease the pro-capital punishment government of Benito Mussolini, so they help inflame the public’s call for blood.

Amelio enhances his film by emphasizing the acrimonious relationship between the judge (Volonté) and the accused, plus the killer’s ties to Palermo’s corrupt ruling body.

In both works, though, justice is seen by most as an obligatory technicality. The film’s tension rises around the judge. Not only is he a foe of capital punishment, he is more concerned in getting to the truth than in saving his career. Yet to do so requires him to proceed with more care than – to honor Norman Maclean – a hipbooted fisherman wading across slippery river rocks.

Reading Sciascia’s novel, which in translation has sentences so complex they would confuse even William Faulkner, it’s hard to see a movie. Sciascia never even describes the murders in a way that brings them to life.

Yet Amelio, by taking his time, carefully outlining the issues, studying the weathered face of Volonté, stressing integrity over expediency – and, of course, letting us see at least one of the murders – manages the task quite well.

So, yes, movies are movies and books are books. But some books, short ones at least, can cross over.

Just don’t ever cast Capt. Kirk.