May 09, 2005
HGtgH
Saw the new Hitchhiker's Guide over the weekend. It was amusing, but I don't think it works as a movie. Not because it "wasn't as good as/the same as" the books. In fact, divergence from the books would be a delightfully appropriate and consistent thing to happen, as all of the various mediums in which the late Douglas Adams' beloved stories appear conflict with each other. The radio program differs from the books which differ from the TV miniseries which differ from the published scripts of radio dramas, etc. I knew beforehand that Hollywood's attempt was going to be different from any of these, so that didn't bother me much.
Where the movie ultimately fails is its attempt at Adams' particular band of humor. A surface reading of Adams' work would lead one to believe that the whole thing us sheer, non-linear, free-associative randomness. This is not the case. First of all, Adams humor is massively subtle and sophisticated, down to the level of grammatical construction. A few examples:
"The major problem - one of the major problems, for there are several - one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them."
"One of the problems, and it's one that is obviously going to get worse, is that all the people at the party are either the children of the grandchildren or the great-grandchildren of the people who wouldn't leave in the first place, and because of all the business abotu selective breeding and recessive genes and so on, it means that all the people now at teh party are either absolutely fanatic partygoers, or gibbering idiots, or, more and more frequently, both."
"The door had to be forced open because of the astonishing accumulation of junk mail on the doormat. It jammed itself stuck on what he would later discover were fourteen identical, personally addressed invitations to apply for a credit card he already had, seventeen identical threatening letters for nonpayment of bills on a credit card he didn't have, thirty-three identical letters saying that he had been specially selected as a man of taste and discrimination who knew what he wanted and where he was going in today's sophisticated jet-setting world and would he therefore like to buy some grotty wallet, and also a dead tabby kitten."
"She sounded, as well she might, extremely skeptical, and Arthur's heart sank. Hardly, he felt, the most conducive setting to try to explain to her as she sat there, suddenly cool and defensive, that in a sort of out-of-body dream he had had a telepathic sense that the mental breakdown she had suffered had been connected with the fact that, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, the Earth had been demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass, something which he alone on Earth knew anything about, having virtually witnessed it from a Vogon spaceship, and that furthermore both his body and soul ached for her unbearably and he needed deeply to go to bed with her as soon as humanly possible.
These monuments to massively drawn out, recursive, run-on sentences serve to create exactly the kind of atmosphere in which Adams' peculiar breed of seeming-randomness is rightly at home. In their very construction, they suggest that the frequent launching-off onto anecdotal tangents that seem utterly unconnected to the main narrative, are, on further analysis, actually quite intimately related.
The film though, due to either the constraints of the medium and the need to be marketable or the lack of skill on the part of the filmmakers, does none of this. It jumps from random event to random event, but with none of the underlying structure of both grammatical genius and calculated vision possessed by Adams. When Adams introduces something utterly ridiculous, it's generally satirical of either the world we live in or the breathless, melodramatic worlds created by the more popular science-fiction authors, and thus funny on a wide number of levels. When the film tries to do the same, it's just random, and much less funny. The one thing you'll hardly ever find in any of Adams' work is a one-liner. His jokes take pages and pages to develop, a style of humor not readily translated to the screen, and which cannot be captured by throwing around a few punchlines. In the attempt to include as many elements and jokes from the books as possible, the filmmakers wind up throwing in a large number of subtle jokes without any of the necessary background or context (narrative or linguistic) to make them coherent, and thus funny.
The movie doesn't work, but not because it fails to meet the standards of the books/televison series/radio dramas, but because it tries to be too like them. The movie would have been a lot better if it had been less faithful to the established "canon" (as conflicted as that canon may be) and stuck with a much smaller slice of Adams' world. A departure from what has gone before would have been entirely appropriate, but the current effort merely hints at Adams' genius while showing just how far the filmmakers fall short of the same. It's amusing. But not genius.
