Free Odd Jobs by John Updike Page A

Turner
? On the other hand, it must be admitted that Jerzy Kosinski, with some help from Peter Sellers, did succeed in making
Being There
a better movie than it was a book. But, then, Kosinski, as he showed in
Reds
, is a natural film performer. He gets, over Norman Mailer in
Ragtime
and George Plimpton in
Volunteers
, the Eighties Authorial Cinemacting Prize.
    In a novel, the prose is the hero, the human thing; the author’s voice is our foremost point of contact and upholds one side of the shifting, teasing relationship we as readers are invited into. In a movie, the actors and actresses are what win us—these giant faces, all but impassive, like the faces of gods. As Wolcott Gibbs wrote some forty years ago, the movies are “an art form fundamentally based on the slow, relentless approach and final passionate collision of two enormous faces.” The mounting of these faces and their collision can be more or less elaborate, and more or less impressive, as directors, scriptwriters, cameramen, grips, costumers, and set designers labor at it, but a bad mounting will not altogether defeat the box-office magic of, say, Marilyn Monroe or Eddie Murphy, and no amount of skillful mounting will make Meryl Streep as winning as Diane Keaton. This visceral simplicity of the cinema embarrasses criticism: Gibbs, in his definitive if unabashedly class-conscious essay, “The Country of the Blind,” described his short-term stint as a film critic as attempting “to write … for the information of my friends about something that was plainly designed for the entertainment of their cooks.”
    Now and then, in watching a movie, we are troubled by awareness of something caught inside and trying to get out, trying to make more sense than the colliding faces that we see. On a recent evening while visiting New York, I walked up Fifth Avenue to view, at the convenient Paris Theatre, a French film called
L’Année des méduses
, starring Valérie Kaprisky. The frisky, risqué picture, located on the French Riviera, devoted itself almost exclusively to the photography of young women’s bare breasts and, when the plot needed thickening, their buttocks. But toward the end, the characters abruptly began to speak in lengthy speeches, and there was a sudden ugly splash of attempted resolution, and I realized that the movie had been based upon a book, and that the book was still in there, still fighting to impose a plot and a moral and even a twist of suave irony upon this pageant of Gallic bathing beauties, which we of the audience had been gazing at in blissful ignorance of any such darkly clever, print-inspired designs. It turns out that the directorof the film was also the author of the book. He did not feel free; he felt he owed himself something. Seeing the movie made me, with an impulse of pity such as all tourists must learn to resist as they thread their way among the importunities of Fifth Avenue, want to read the book.
A Nameless Rose
    T HE N AME OF THE R OSE was an unlikely book to adapt for the cinema—intensely literary, bleak in mood and moral, and loaded with in-jokes only a semiotician who was also a medievalist could love. Yet the film’s makers, a mix of European names, have done an honorable and at moments moving job of converting one thing—an obdurately textual text, abstruse and challenging—into another, a succession of filmed images ultimately conforming to a moviegoer’s conventional expectations.
    Movie and novel alike boldly ask us to conceive of the Middle Ages
intellectually
, as an arena of contesting ideas rather than the hackneyed site of tourney and Crusade, of flying pennants and glinting armor, of picturesque battles clouding the sky with arrows and colorfully gowned beauties exciting the clash of heraldry-laden combatants. The motion-picture version of
The Name of the Rose
, but for a recurrent splash of blood, is relentlessly dull in color, all gray and brown. The cast, but for a single besmudged and silent