A River Runs Through It: Book vs. Film Adaptation

Introduction: Film vs. Prose as Artistic Media

"The movie isn't as good as the book." This phrase has become a truism about almost every filmed depiction of a novel, particularly when Hollywood is responsible for the production. However, in the case of director Robert Redford's film adaptation of Norman Maclean's novella A River Runs Through It, a more fair critique might be that the film is inevitably different, not necessarily worse. Redford took an intensely introverted, philosophical book — highly dependent upon internal as well as external character development — and attempted to render it into the visual medium of film.

It must be universally acknowledged that films and books will always differ in their artistic nature. A critic must do so, and even a casual viewer and lover of a text must concede as much in order to be thoroughly fair to all present and future attempts to render print into the medium of movies. Books are a verbal medium. Films, in contrast, are a visual medium. What an author creates in print — such as a character's inner voice — a film must convey through sights and sounds. This is why even the best films often seem less character-driven and more plot-driven than relatively modest books. The human eye, drawn to the screen, is invariably attracted to action rather than to psychological, internal development, even when that development is conveyed through a voice-over or witty, ruminative dialogue.

Redford's Visual Rendering of Maclean's Words

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 and fly fishing." Both the book and the film tell the tale of two sons of a rural Montana Presbyterian minister. Redford does not alter the overall, loose structure of the book's plot in any significant way 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 fishing's minutiae into the sights of scaly fish and the sounds of rushing water. Even though he adopts a great deal of Maclean's dialogue and transposes it onto the screen, the split between spoken words and the visual spectacle of woods and water dilutes — no pun intended — the elemental, spare force of those words. Again, this functions not so much as a critique of Redford or his direction, but as a critique of the limits of visual film to ever truly novelize a story that depends upon characterization for so much of its compelling nature.

The Fire Scene and the Primacy of Action

Much of the book centers around the climactic event of a fire, which is chilling to witness on screen. Yet this very vividness creates a further bifurcation between the power and nature of the film and the book. In the book, what the fire does to the relationships between family members is the heart of the character-dominated plot. In the film, it is the fire itself that draws the eye and commands the viewer's focus. The events of the moment, rather than what happens before and after the fire, assume added significance because of the visual importance of a conflagrating blaze on screen.

Conclusion: Doomed by the Medium

"I am haunted by waters," is the last line of the book. As a voice-over in the film, it lacks the finality of the written text and thus its final power. It is easy to understand, upon seeing the film, why viewers who loved the book were disappointed — perhaps that disappointment is inevitable for all devoted readers when they see their best literary companions rendered on screen. However, given the literary elements Redford had to transpose into images, and considering the ambition of the project, it seems this particular creation was especially doomed to fall short. The film is not a failure of direction so much as a demonstration of the structural limits of what the visual medium can do with a story whose greatest power lives entirely within the written word.