Frank Masi / Broad Green PicturesIt’s hard to adapt a beloved book to the screen, but it’s not impossible. 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. 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!”
Bill Bryson wrote the wonderfully comic A Walk in the Woods. But while this film keeps the bare outlines of Bryson’s story, it both misunderstands his comic voice and conveys it wrongly. 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.
Ho hum. So the book was better. What else is new?
The fascinating thing about A Walk in the Woods is not just that it is bad but that it is instructively bad. 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. It’s worth looking at three of those that are bungled in A Walk in the Woods: fidelity, form, and finish.
Fidelity
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. In fact, it can be the hobgoblin of little minds or the artistic equivalent of fundamentalism—straining at gnats and swallowing camels.
But it’s certainly true that good works of art are unified. You can’t change one part, however small, without creating ripples that disturb the rest of the narrative.
The biggest change in A Walk in the Woods stems from the casting. Bill Bryson was forty-seven when A Walk in the Woods was published; Robert Redford was seventy-nine when this film was released. 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. 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.
And there’s more. The movie opens with a television interview in which we find out that Bill hasn’t written anything since he published I’m a Stranger Here Myself. A successful writer in mid-career with writer’s block is a vastly different animal than a one-hit wonder nearly four decades removed from his claim to fame.
Frank Masi / Broad Green PicturesFurthermore, before Bill heads out on the trail he calls literally everyone he knows asking for someone to go with him. The inability to find a buddy in mid-career speaks to our busy schedules and can act as a wake-up call to make one aware of one’s own isolation. In the film, it implies Bill is cranky, unpleasant person who has been incapable of sustaining any relationships except with his wife.
Unorthodox casting or major changes in plot and setting don’t make a good adaptation impossible, but they certainly make it hard. Peter Jackson only inserted Viggo Mortenson as Aragorn after initially casting Stuart Townsend. Michael J. Fox took over the role of Marty McFly from Eric Stoltz. And wasn’t Eddie Murphy’s role in Beverly Hills Cop originally offered to Sylvester Stallone? Different actors make very different movies.
Form
In general, books can also accommodate non-linear narratives a bit better than movies can. Sure, there are some good experimental films—but the Hollywood staple is the traditional narrative structure with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
The book A Walk in the Woods is a comic travelogue interspersed with philosophical musings and wry observations. Bryson can devote a couple pages to the geological history that created different rock patterns or to the demise of the American Chestnut tree without holding the narrative captive, because in his book the narrative is secondary. It is really just an excuse to listen to Bryson riff on some arcane topic or another. It doesn’t matter if he is writing about England, Australia, Shakespeare, or the Appalachian Trail.
Frank Masi / Broad Green PicturesBut in the film, the narrative is primary, so Bill’s speeches are reduced to casual asides. And rather than come across as a delightfully erudite source of knowledge, he ends up sounding like a pompous gasbag. The stars sure look nice, Katz muses. The nearest star to us is Alpha Centauri, Bill replies, which is blah, blah, blah light years, and part of the blah, blah, blah galaxy, until you just want to punch him in the face so that he will shut the heck up and enjoy being in the present moment.
Some books with meandering plot structures have made it to the screen successfully. The Sound and The Fury maintains Faulkner’s stream of consciousness plotting; Inherent Vice miraculously satisfies Pynchon fans, and the British version of Fever Pitch somehow transforms Nick Hornby’s autobiographical musings into a coherent fictional narrative without losing its author’s distinctive voice.
So it can be done. But not by simply taking the narrative parts out of a non-narrative book and filming just them.
Finish
Finally, each film has little finishing touches—details that aren’t major parts of its plot, but are important to the book’s fans. When I returned home from a screening of A Walk in the Woods, the first thing two readers of the book asked me was, “How was the Pop-Tart scene?” When I reported that the film did not include it (although there was a slight variation of it when Katz says he wants to kill an obnoxious hiker they met on the trail), both immediately lost interest.
One of the easiest parts of the adaptation should have been skewering the hippie-hiker culture, a strange hybrid of yuppie excess and adolescent hipsterism. But here, the satirical parts get reduced to zingy, often crabby, one-liners that go further towards making Bryson sound like a jerk than they do towards making us gently laugh at human foibles. When one hiker at a cabin askes Bill why he bought the particular brand of backpack he did, Bill responds that it was so he didn’t have to carry all his stuff in his arms. Rimshot.
I thought director Ken Kwapis’s competent direction was well suited for the straightforward story telling of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (also an adaptation), and I defended his save-the-whale film, Big Miracle. But this film felt tone deaf. The shots of the Appalachian Trail itself were awkwardly integrated, and the closing credits includes a highlight reel of the film we just saw . . . which is itself a highlight reel of the book many of us just read.
Frank Masi / Broad Green PicturesThere are fewer pleasures in life greater than revisiting a piece of music, a painting, a book, or a film and noticing a detail you missed the first time around. Those finishing touches are products of artists who went the extra mile not just to retell a funny punchline but also to set it up carefully, not just to get the story told but to tell it in a memorable and meaningful way. A Walk in the Woods is a delightfully quirky story that Kwapis, Redford, and screenplay writers Rick Herb and Bill Holderman pound into dust and pour into the squarest cookie-cutter mold imaginable.
Caveat Spectator
A Walk in the Woods is rated R, primarily for language. Surprisingly, there is a moderate to heavy amount of profanity and obscene language. Some of the humor is scatological, and both Bill and Katz are free with their use of the two biggest and most common swear words. (The excremental one hits the trifecta, getting used in noun, verb, and adjectival form.) Jesus’s name is used as an interjection at least once, and the two hikers refer to a group of adolescent scouts as “little f—ers.” There is no nudity to speak of (okay, we do see Katz’s butt crack as he crawls into his tent), but there are several crude references to sexual encounters. Katz tells the Bryson family, including Bill’s wife, an allegedly funny story about their young adulthood that strongly insinuates Bill got a sexually transmitted disease from a hook up. He himself picks up a married woman while on the hike, leading to a painfully unfunny episode with lots of jokes about sex with fat women and the pair being chased by a jealous husband. Bill and Katz are picked up as hitch hikers by a young couple who are intoxicated while driving; the female stranger fellates the male driver as the scene’s punchline. Katz references his sexual history several times, expressing disbelief at Bill’s claim that he has never cheated on his wife and exclaiming, “I’ve been with way more married women . . . ” It is definitely not a date night movie.
Kenneth R. Morefield (@kenmorefield) is an Associate Professor of English at Campbell University. He is the editor of Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema, Volumes I, II, & III, and the founder of 1More Film Blog.
