River Runs Through it and "A River Runs through It"
Norman Maclean's book vs. The Redford movie -- An illustration of the limits of the visual media of film to transmute the philosophical media of prose
The movie isn't as good as the book." This phrase has become a truism about almost every filmed depiction of a novel, particularly if Hollywood is responsible for the production. However, in the case of director Robert Redford's film of the Norman Maclean novella A River Runs Through It, a more fair critique of Redford's effort might be that the film is inevitably different, not necessarily better. Redford took an intensely introverted, philosophical book, highly dependant upon internal as well as external character development and attempted to render it into the visual media of film.
It must be universally acknowledged that films and books will always differ in their artistic nature to one another. A critic must do so and even a casual viewer and lover of a text must do so in his or her heart, to be thoroughly fair to all present and future attempts to render print into the media of the movies. Books are a verbal medium. Films, in contrast, are a visual medium. With what the author creates in print, such as a character's voice, films must put into sights and sounds. This is why even the best of films often seem less character driven and more plot driven than rather pedestrian books. The human eye invariably on the screen is attracted to action rather than to psychological, internal development, even when conveyed through a voice over or witty or ruminative dialogue.
Redford's challenge is immediately apparent because Maclean's book begins with such a memorable line. "In our family, there was no clear line between religion...
Redford does not alter the overall, loose structure of the book's plot in any significant degree from a narrative point-of-view. In both works of art, fly-fishing for trout in a local river becomes the only sense of common, mutual connection between two brothers and their father.
In telling this tale, Redford as a director renders the detailed descriptions of the minutia of fishing into the sights of scaly fish and the sounds of rushing water. Even though Redford adopts a great deal of the
dialogue from the book and transposes it onto the screen, the fact that there is a split between dialogue and the sight of the woods and water dilutes, no pun intended, the elemental and spare force of the words that are spoken. Again, this functions not so much as a critique of Redford, nor his direction, but a critique of the limits of the visual medium of film to ever truly novelize a story that is dependant upon characterization for so much of its compelling nature.
Thus, the fact so much of the book centers around the climatic event of a fire, which is chilling to watch, actually creates a further bifurcation between the
power and the nature of the film and book. In the book, it is what the fire does to the relationship between the
family members in question that is important to the character-dominated structure of the plot. In the film, it is the fire itself that draws the eye and the viewer's focus. The events of the moment, rather than what happens before and after the fire, assume an added significance because of the visual importance of a conflagrating blaze on the screen.
Less excusably, even some of the humor of the actions of the book is lost with the loss of a retrospective, narrative voice. For instance, fly fishing is not necessarily something inherently funny to watch, but only becomes funny when encapsulated in Maclean's occasionally ironic, biting prose, that the father "told us about Christ's
disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of…
