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Reason...
Atlas Shrugged: Is A
(the Movie) Really A (the Novel)?
The film should please fans, but might not please everyone.
By Brian Doherty
March 11, 2011
The official release of the movie Atlas Shrugged Part One, based on Ayn
Rand’s controversial 1957 novel, is not until April 15. It then begins
a limited theatrical rollout in 11 American cities (which the producers
hope will grow from there).
It has already been previewed to selected audiences in Los Angeles,
D.C., and New York. I saw it in Los Angeles, on the Sony Pictures lot,
in a screening regretfully marred by technical problems (with a
projector that put thin blue vertical lines throughout the film image).
Still, the film’s qualities—both good and bad—came through. Anyone with
a passionate interest in Ayn Rand and her opus will want to see, and
will surely appreciate on many levels, this film version of a third of
the novel.
Early word is encouraging for the film’s producers, John Aglialoro (CEO
of the Cybex exercise equipment company and sole financier of this
independently-produced film) and Harmon Kaslow. The world of
Objectivist fans, those with a passionate attachment to their own
vision of the book, seem likely unsatisfiable by anything that doesn’t
spring directly from their imaginations to the theater of their minds.
But the early reactions from Randians has been positive, with adulation
from Rand’s closest friends and disciples during the years she wrote
Atlas, Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, who were both blown away, and
love from the Atlas Society’s philosophical linchpin David Kelley (who
advised Aglialoro in every step of the process, to ensure the resulting
script passed Objectivist muster). By the same token, some people who
don’t care for Rand have also hated the film.
When I interviewed him for a forthcoming May feature story in Reason,
producer Kaslow told me that they knew expectations were low for the
movie because of its relatively small budget and rushed production
schedule (reported frequently as $5 million, though the shoot ended up
costing $10 million). Indeed, some reviewers based their admiration for
the finished product somewhat on their hideous fears about it based on
early reports.
The end result is definitely better than merely “not a disaster.” Atlas
Shrugged the novel is divided into three parts, all named for different
statements of Rand’s beloved Aristotelian “law of identity.” (A is A.)
Part one is “non-contradiction.” So, is Atlas Shrugged Part One (the
movie) equal to Atlas Shrugged (the novel, Part One)?
To give a mealy-mouthed answer, one that would cause Rand to condemn me
as a mystical whim worshipper: It is and it isn’t. This movie has some
of the same flaws I saw in another attempt at a faithful adaptation of
a work of fantastic literature long thought unfilmable, Zach Snyder’s
2009 version of Watchmen, based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore and
Dave Gibbons (which had its own Objectivist angle). That is, it struck
me as a series of filmed recreations of scenes from the famous novel,
with as much faithfulness to the source as the time limits of a
commercial film allow. But that doesn’t necessarily add up to a
well-conceived movie that stands on its own. Despite its virtues as a
filmed adaptation of the novel, the movie qua movie doesn’t have enough
to offer those not familiar with the source material, even if they
aren’t inclined to hate Rand for her message.
Atlas is a densely thought out and constructed work that takes its
characters on a full and exhilarating arc, through a plot and theme and
mystery with a dynamite resolution. This movie only takes you a third
of the way, and I can’t imagine anyone not dimly aware of the book’s
premise feeling anything but empty or puzzled at the movie’s ending
(which is precisely the ending of Part One of the novel).
I am not trained to judge cinematography, but from a basic perspective
this looked like a real professional film, with everything from the
offices to the train rides to the parties looking how they needed to
look—better than I expected from my three days on the set during the
shooting, thanks to the magic of post-production and sharp editing.
As far as acting goes, I was not as impressed as others have been with
Taylor Schilling as Dagny Taggart, the heroic railroad executive
fighting to keep her company alive and the bloodlines of American oil
pumping (and to make a buck, like a good Objectivist). She had moments
where she conveyed the lithe, restrained, passionate steel of Dagny,
but didn’t do so every moment. Some of her line readings fell flat,
some of her expressions were too blank or sometimes too light and
sunny. In what might count as a backhanded insult, she sometimes seemed
too much like a normal human being for a Randian romantic heroine.
Grant Bowler as Henry Rearden, inventor of the wonder amalgam Rearden
Metal, held down by his needy and contemptuous family and a government
prepared to crush any industrial success, was more consistently solid.
He manages, in a few seconds of screen time, to communicate something
of the unspoken and complicated joy in his own creation that Rand took
pages to explain.
Bowler especially shines in his interactions with his ne’er do well
family and friends, and complicatedly hateful wife Lillian (Rebecca
Wisocky), who I found the most perfectly acted role. (Bowler coped less
well with the very slow-burn passion and eventual affair with Dagny.)
Smaller roles like former business genius turned dissolute playboy
Francisco d’Anconia (Jsu Garcia) (all of whose backstory flashbacks
from the novel were cut), Rearden frenemy Paul Larkin (Patrick
Fischler), and striking philosopher Hugh Akston (Michael O’Keefe),
shone as well in a way that felt very much right from the novel.
Matthew Marsden has a great, but more distinct, take on Dagny’s brother
James Taggart. He reinvented a character that, in the novel, feels a
harried pathetic wreck into something of a douchebag smoothie (Marsden
plays younger and more handsome than I expect most imagined James to
be), making it more clear and believable that he would be a successful
empty shell in a world run by pull, not achievement.
It’s delightful for fans to hear on screen Randian lines about fools
who consider knowledge to be superfluous, idiot “wise men” who talk of
happiness as an illusion of the superficial, and the heroes bravely but
foolishly taking on the burden “to move the world, and to pull all the
others through.” It was less delightful to hear too much
pseudo-scientific overexplaining of the amazing mystery motor, and
clumsy and bludgeoning soundbites from John Galt selling the idea of
the strike—“a place where heroes live...no government beyond a few
courthouses…”
I wouldn’t be an Atlas fan if I didn’t have some objections, which I
think are not merely a desire to see it be “more like the book” but to
be a stronger film. Losing the scene where Dagny takes control of the
stalled Taggart Comet (the introduction to Dagny in the book) hurt. It
would have helped the weight of the character onscreen to see her
efficacy up front, represented in something other than barreling over
her weak brother in office arguments.
Not all my talks with writer Brian O’Toole convinced me that he “got”
Rand’s philosophy the same way most libertarians do—a problem that
O’Toole has been facing bravely with thousands of Rand fans on the
movie’s Facebook page—but none of that was apparent on-screen. O’Toole
saw analogies between one of his favorite films, Metropolis, and Rand
that I don’t quite see. And he has a sense of absurd humor that’s
decidedly un-Randian, joking after the screening that if he had his
way, during the first successful run of the John Galt Line over a
bridge made of Rearden Metal, Godzilla would have destroyed the bridge.
That sense of humor isn’t in the film, of course, which hews tightly to
a grim and tense Randian tone. There is not a moment where an honest
fan of Rand could say that the makers of this film just didn’t get it.
But what about non-fans of Rand? My favorite example of the mental
challenges placed in the path of any who would dare adapt Atlas came
from Jeff Britting, who manages the official Ayn Rand archives. He
wrote: “not until the writer of record is ready and willing to
dramatize Atlas Shrugged in total silence, will he be able to adapt the
novel.”
Well, Britting had his eccentric reasons for making the boldly nutty
claim. But one of the failures of Atlas Shrugged Part One (which had
few in terms of faithfully putting Rand’s characters and plot on
screen) is that it was too silent on one of the aspects of Rand that
her detractors most hate: the speeches. While part one of the novel
does not feature the greatest concentration of long disquisitions on
the philosophical meaning of the story’s theme, the movie did skip some
that would have been helpful in hitting the viewer who didn’t already
understand where Rand was coming from.
Too much of Rearden and Dagny’s pride and pain aren’t fully felt in
this movie without the movie being more precise about the philosophy
that motivated them, and the alternate philosophy that motivated their
enemies. Specifically, I think the movie would have been stronger if
some version of Dan Conway’s speech to Dagny (on page 82) about how
looters couldn’t run a railroad; some version of Francisco’s speech (on
page 99) on how well you do your work being the only important thing in
life; and some version of Lillian’s presenting Rearden (on page 290)
with her theory about love as self-sacrifice.
For Rand, theme, character, and plot are all a seamless web, and this
filmed version is unbalanced with the latter two at the expense of the
former. I expect this movie’s fate will be to be mostly admired with
caveats by Rand fans, mostly hated and condemned by her enemies (one of
whom declared the film socially dangerous before it was made), and
probably just a thin emotional experience for those who have no opinion
or knowledge of the novel either way.
In a decision screenwriter Brian O’Toole disagreed with, wanting it to
be more timeless, the movie is set in a near-future 2016, with a quick
and neat scenario explaining why, in a world with limited gas coming in
from overseas, Colorado oilman Ellis Wyatt would be central to the U.S.
economy. It avoids seeming political in a current event sense by never
using terms like liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, or
naming any actually existing political office. Still, especially coming
out now, its pro-business and anti-union overtones will make the movie
read politically anyway.
Well, Rand wouldn’t have had it any other way. It seems churlish and
perhaps besides the point to complain that a movie of a third of a
novel lacks the emotional and intellectual coherence and punch of that
novel, but there it is. But for a movie that its makers kept assuring
me was intended to lead more people to read the book, it will probably
only work as a fully satisfying movie for people who already have.
Senior Editor Brian Doherty is author of This is Burning Man
(BenBella), Radicals for Capitalism (PublicAffairs) and Gun Control on
Trial (Cato Institute).
Read it with links at Reason
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