Image and Word

I usually find such a pronouncement snotty and affected, but here it goes: I liked the book better.

I am not a literary partisan. Reading a book and watching the movie it inspires are vastly different experiences. Films must often compress the scope of a novel to fit the format; characters will be amalgamated, cherished details lost. But the payoff is the visual impact of the big screen, the profound emotional reaction that can be evoked by immersing oneself in the moving images.

What both forms have in common, however, is story-telling. Philip Pullman’s novel The Golden Compass, excels in that regard. The book’s strength is that Pullman fashions a fully-realized world, but has the confidence to unfold it slowly for the reader. Details are trickled out slowly; half-revealed truths and untied ends are always nagging. You turn the page because you, like the young heroine Lyra, are just learning this universe and yearn to find out the next unknown thing.

The recently released film of the same name, however, dispenses with the mystery nearly immediately. During the opening credits, in fact, a voice-over explains several of the key precepts that in takes readers of the novel hundreds of pages to divine. Not just once, but three times, the dialogue explicitly identifies an alethiometer (a hand-held truth-telling device given to Lyra early in the story) as the golden compass of the title, an explanation that is neither useful nor necessary. This rush to revelation is a problem that plagues the entire film. Though the movie’s visuals create an astoundingly detailed, sumptuous world, each scene is so weighed down by exposition that the viewer has nary an opportunity to absorb these luxurious details.

The characters don’t do much more than the narrative to draw in the viewer. Daniel Craig, who recently brought movie-goers a vital, visceral James Bond, fails to duplicate the feat with the character of Lyra’s uncle, Lord Asriel. He feels somehow too small for the role; he is lost among the grandeur of the sweeping digital landscapes and the roars of the digital ice bears (the movie’s term for polar bears, which I rather like). Nicole Kidman was perfectly cast as the cold, cruel Mrs. Coulter, the villain of the piece, but she still fails to capture the character’s ability to utterly enthrall her victims–the hallmark of her persona in the novel.

Books and movies are different yes. But the film version of The Golden Compass could have benefited from Pullman’s ability to trust his audience to figure things out in their own time.