For instance, the crass, scatological humor and sexual crudity plays very different coming from the mouths of a pair of octogenarians than it would from two middle-aged lost boys. That one bit of casting changes what is essentially a midlife crisis book into a quixotic attempt of an elderly protagonist to not go gentle into that good night, and that has a lot of repercussions. Bill Bryson was forty-seven when A Walk in the Woods was published Robert Redford was seventy-nine when this film was released. The biggest change in A Walk in the Woods stems from the casting. You can’t change one part, however small, without creating ripples that disturb the rest of the narrative.
In fact, it can be the hobgoblin of little minds or the artistic equivalent of fundamentalism-straining at gnats and swallowing camels.īut it’s certainly true that good works of art are unified. Though we might at first think otherwise, a scrupulous faithfulness to every detail of the plot is not the only-or even most important-quality of an adaptation. It’s worth looking at three of those that are bungled in A Walk in the Woods: fidelity, form, and finish. It points up several key problems with adaptation, and it helps us understand the potential land mines that have to be avoided when moving from page to screen. The fascinating thing about A Walk in the Woods is not just that it is bad but that it is instructively bad. The result is a drab road trip film, a cross between Grumpy Old Men and National Lampoon’s Vacation, as the aged Bryson (Robert Redford) and his crude former buddy Katz (Nick Nolte) set out to hike the Appalachian Trail. But while this film keeps the bare outlines of Bryson’s story, it both misunderstands his comic voice and conveys it wrongly.
The worst adaptations are the ones that leave you asking in frustration, “What went wrong?” and insisting, “But that should have been a great movie!”īill Bryson wrote the wonderfully comic A Walk in the Woods. For every high-profile success-think To Kill a Mockingbird, Gone With the Wind, or Lord of the Rings-the Hollywood roadside is littered with even more colossal misfires: The Scarlet Letter, Ender’s Game, The Hobbit, The Great Gatsby, Alice in Wonderland, How The Grinch Stole Christmas, Unbroken, Dune. It’s hard to adapt a beloved book to the screen, but it’s not impossible. Robert Redford and Nick Nolte in 'A Walk in the Woods'
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