Are There Any Film Adaptations Of Agnes Grey?

Oh man, I would LOVE to see a scene by scene take of how the first act of this book would be set up by a screenwriter. As it stands, the first act of the book is spent really detailing out the world before the bombs go off, but a film would likely have to compact that down to explosions in media res with much quiet character establishment being lost. Typically, in an adaptation, the quiet setup of the book is the first thing to get chopped. It would be very possible to combine Josh and Robin into one character, cut the whole trip to the cabin with the survivalist and then have a more direct journey to the valley. All things that are necessary evils to the story, but really change up the rhythm of the thing.

I love film and many of the literary works adapted into films. The ‘Anne’ series by Montgomery has been adapted many times for film and television. My favorite Anne on screen is Megan Follows in the 1985 miniseries which is considered the best adaptation of ‘Anne of Green Gables’. The new Netflix series ‘Anne with an E’ took some risks to comment on the current social climate which did resonate with many young people but unfortunately lost some of the original fans of the books. The show was cancelled after three seasons. Animation fans might appreciate the earnest 70s anime ‘Akage no Anne’ which stays remarkably true to the original novel in its 50 episodes or so. More recently a 2017 TV movie titled ‘L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables’ was made in a quieter, more old-fashioned style, but has failed to gain as much recognition as the two adaptations mentioned above. It’s a shame that the 1919 silent film version of ‘Anne of Green Gables’ has been lost to the sands of time.

I have a few credits here: A Severed Head (1970 film), The Sea, The Sea (1988 TV), The Italian Girl (1991 TV), The Black Prince (1996 TV). And that’s it. There may be other projects in development but none have hit the ‘rumor’ or ‘radio’ stages yet. As a body of work, Ishiguro’s is tiny yet monumental. It is literary work which resists translation in purely written form. Or maybe it just needs a good interpreter? For A Fairly Honourable Defeat I would cast Alice Birch.

It’s nice that not all of the main characters are young. Agnes is an older, retired woman. Mr. Henderson is an elderly gentleman. The concerns of the story are related to maintaining a home, making do with limited resources, maintaining peace and learning. These are all very relevant to an older generation, often overlooked in fantasy. Even the conflicts are dealt with in a mature, wise and long term manner – all about compromise, good sense and looking after things in the best possible way. The one young character, Leo, is there to provide a link to the rest of the series which centers around the older and milder protagonists. It’s all rather quietly revolutionary.

This is really fascinating. So many great points about how it’s unfilmable, but then people said that about ‘Life of Pi’ and ‘Cloud Atlas’ too. Difficult books are often the best source material for films, because they challenge the filmmaker to find new ways to represent them. The internal monologue of the novel would be the biggest challenge to represent on film, possibly by using shifting color palettes and distorted sound to represent the protagonist’s memory, or even using surreal flashbacks. It would take a really visionary director to make this work, though. Someone like Lynne Ramsay, who is so good at representing subjective, traumatic interiority would be my first choice. The impossibility of it all is probably what makes it so attractive.

Recently I watched Pasolini’s brilliant, but certainly not literal adaptation of Chaucer’s 'The Canterbury Tales', from 1972. The animated version from 1984 is lighter and more focused on the moral messages of the tales. Lastly I saw 'A Knight’s Tale' (2001), again not an exact adaption but rather a story inspired by Chaucer. All the movies offer a different perspective on the age old tales of Chaucer.

No adaptation has been made yet, but I have one wild idea for an animated film. Rather than going with a typical Disney adaptation, I would want it to be a little more artistic, like a Studio Ghibli film or a Cartoon Saloon film (such as The Song of the Sea). The bizarre physicality of the circus could be portrayed beautifully in an animated film and the completely realized magic would be less to feel fake than in live-action. The muted colors of the film with splashes of red would be stunning. Rather than trying to get the emotions of the characters right in live-action and failing, the emotions of the quiet heart of the story would likely shine through much more in an animated adaptation. It’s a long shot, but if there are any animators out there, then this would be the perfect magic to bring to life.

So these adaptations are sort of a mess, but mostly fun. They are the literary equivalent of an unhealthy snack that you devour because it tastes so good, even though you know it’s terrible for you. ‘ Scruples’ is probably the most coherent, because the book was written as episodic TV, so it translates best. ‘ Princess Daisy’ is a beautiful disaster of a short film that tries to condense decades of a global saga into a short space and it all feels a bit mad and rushed. ‘ Mistral’s Daughter’ is really good as a miniseries, because it’s able to allow the story to breathe in a way that feels natural for the family centric story. The acting is very hit and miss – in one scene, someone can be completely reserved, and in the next, he or she can be soap-opera-like in their behavior. But it’s all part of the fun. You watch these because of the clothes, the score, and the sheer incredible-ness of the plots. These are not serious attempts at “quality” TV. They are just happy, glamorous entertainments. For the most part, they succeed at what they’re trying to do.

A better use of time pondering a film adaptation of David Lipsky’s fences than actually reading the rest of Lipsky’s work and the authors he draws upon. Read The Pale King for more agonizing beautiful focus on boredom. Read George Saunders for great satire and great humanity. Read A Naked Singularity by David NapirPolikoff for another long and miserable book about a failing system. The question of the film adaptation is a red herring. The book exists. It’s on a shelf somewhere. Read it directly rather than waiting for someone to reduce it to a simple movie experience. The climb is the point.

I get this question all the time from book clubs and it is always a resounding “no, but it should be.” The idea of a historian in a wheelchair trying to reconstruct the doomed marriage of his grandparents in the Old West while suffering in isolation in the 1970s is already made for a prestige miniseries. It would be wonderful to see the cast of characters as older and younger versions. The different time periods and the two vastly different settings (Old West frontier versus isolated 1970s academics) would provide wonderful scope for a great visual script. But the biggest obstacle to this would be framing the story within the story of historian Lyman. As it is, the reader is forced to realize how biased and inaccurate Lyman’s history is, and that would be the lazy way for an adapter to go for a period piece and lose the whole point of the book. Someone with real insight and sensitivity to the work would be required to translate it for the screen. Perhaps, for the best, no one has rushed to adapt this yet. But someone will get to it sooner or later and I hope to heaven they will do it justice.