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Fahrenheit 451

5/30/2018

4 Comments

 

D
​1.13

A fireman entrusted with burning the nation's books has a crisis of conscience.

Directed by Ramin Bahrani
Starring Michael B. Jordan and Michael Shanon
​Initial Review by Jon Kissel

Picture
HBO’s original programming, consisting of series, movies, and miniseries, have a clear laggard in that trio.  The movies don’t have anywhere near the cultural persistence that either series or miniseries have, despite HBO’s considerable marketing and development prowess.  The standard format for feature-length films are adaptations of real events, and the strictures of sticking to history don’t let the actors do much more than impressions of well-known figures while the directing is utilitarian A-to-B event tracking.  These are sometimes great, like the you-are-there history of Path to War or Conspiracy of the early-aughts, but have lately been Al Pacino in a series of bizarre wigs or make-up as he trolls for Emmy awards by playing disgraced public figures.  Literary adaptations are more comfortable in the miniseries category (Empire Falls, Olive Kitteridge), and after reading the Wikipedia plot description of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, that may have been the better route.  Ramin Bahrani attempts to cram a lot of plot and character motivation into 100 minutes, and ends up exchanging believable arcs and actions for ostentatious camera movement and bludgeoning political satire.  If this is the art that survives the Second Civil War, we’re in trouble.

Bahrani and co-writer Amir Naderi keep the basic plot of Bradbury’s book in that both take place in a dystopia where books are illegal and are actively sought out and destroyed by repurposed fire brigades in pursuit of societal harmony.  A participant becomes a resister, and so on.  The biggest departure from the book seems to be the elevation of up-and-coming fireman Guy Montag (Michael B. Jordan) and his captain John Beatty (Michael Shannon) at the expense of Montag’s wife, who doesn’t exist in the movie.  The script adds some paternal motivations here for Montag and Beatty, such that it’s clearly supposed to be a key emotional crux of the film.  One doesn’t cast Michael Shannon, however, if one is trying to convey a kind of warm rapport with another actor.  Bahrani previously worked with Shannon in 99 Homes, another film in which he took a younger man under his wing in an ethically-questionable endeavor, but that was a Faustian dynamic.  In Fahrenheit 451, the actors are going for playful in some scenes and admiring in others and I do not think any of it works.  This failure robs the film of much of any punch as Montag and Beatty start to separate from each other.

Jordan is better-cast as Montag, but Bahrani also hampers him with too much distance on his arc.  He goes from the most enthusiastic of firemen to the man who sacrifices himself to brings art back into the world.  Why couldn’t he already have been disillusioned when the film started, shortening the distance he has to go?  Instead, the film struggles both in communicating how or why he’s particularly good at his job, or in how the cracks start to form in his psyche.  He is boldly and forcefully asserting the destructive force of the Eels, verbally dehumanizing them and gleefully casting them out of society, and then he’s suddenly moved by one’s death and taking the unchallenged word of not only an Eel, but an Eel who squeals on other Eels.  He has apparently been keeping artifacts in his air ducts, but that person is so much more believable as someone further down the ladder instead of a city-wide hero.  Maybe his position was elevated to get him closer to Beatty, but as previously stated, their rapport is ineffective.  One of my favorite tropes in cinema is ‘person wakes up to the lies they’ve been told,’ and Montag should have several of those kinds of epiphanies.  They’re included as mere events that need to happen by Bahrani instead of transcendent moments for Montag.

Bahrani, Naderi, and DP Kramer Morgenthau are being actively annoying in other spots.  If there’s one thing I don’t like, it’s fish-eye lenses, and Fahrenheit 451 has a whole bunch of them.  All that’s needed is the early one, representing the view of the Alexa-equivalents that are everywhere, but they keep showing up, including when the fire truck is racing to a raid.  Despite the constant surveillance, there isn’t that feeling of inevitability that should accompany it.  Instead, characters get away with things they shouldn’t, and then get found out thanks to old fashioned stake-outs.  The whiff that is the surveillance theme goes along with the strike that is the portent and self-seriousness in so many shots.  Look at the roiling waves on Montag’s wall while he thinks about his role in the world.  Gross.  The camera tricks and blatant imagery are strangling the film, and this is compounded by the ham-fisted use of current buzzwords or phrases that rip the viewer out of the experience.  Avatar insisted on having a character say the soldiers were ‘going to fight terror with terror’ and that was a film with a full-on bad script.  Fahrenheit 451 does the same when it says anything close to fake news or job-takers.  Unique times call for unique satire, and this film ain’t it.
​
The aforementioned Wikipedia summary reads extremely ahead of its time for a book published in 1953.  There’s plenty to work with for a contemporary adaptation, from the narcotization of the citizenry with inane media to the gleeful surrendering of privacy to technological firms and the encroaching idiocracy coupled with my favorite word of the Trump era, kakistocracy (government of the worst).  Fahrenheit 451 doesn’t stretch towards any of these outcomes, squandering its strong premise in favor of half-baked character dynamics and on-the-nose references.  D+
4 Comments
Bobby
5/30/2018 08:14:52 pm

Oh hey... I watched a movie.

I didn't know what to expect here... as, I actually haven't read the book. A friend wanted to watch it, so we did... as she just finished a re-read in preparation. She hated what they did with it.

For me, it was just a really sub-par movie. None of the characters really moved me. The plot didn't pull me in. It was pretty blah in terms of action... and everything. The only things worth watching were Michael Shannon's expressions... at least he wrote all of those notes and burned them, though, cause that reallllly showed us his dynamic character.

Fly away bird, fly away... and take this shitty movie with you. D

Reply
Lane
6/8/2018 07:19:52 am

It’s pretty evident in the title sequence that “Fahrenheit 451” isn’t going to be a very good film. It’s actually not a good book, and I realize that’s an opinion contrary to the canon of Barnes and Noble “Summer Reading” tables. But, the film really just adopts what is worst about the novel—its boring preachiness, its naivete, its faux intellectualism—and adds in bad acting and worse writing. Here’s what would actually would have helped to make a good film: if the majority of the writers, cast, and crew of “Fahrenheit 451” had actually read the books they’re making a film about burning. Making this film now is a bit of cultural bad faith. It’s a misreading of how things turned out, which is a real shame because there might be a good film to be made here—this just isn’t it.

The problem that any lover of science fiction—and I count myself in that number—has to deal with is that sometimes science fiction gets it wrong. There was a book I read a while back in one iteration of grad school--it was about technology and religion and culture and some crap like that, and I don’t remember the name of it, but I do remember one point it made that I think is pertinent here. It talked about how there are really only two science fiction stories from the 20th century that made it into “The Literary Canon”: “Brave New World” and “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

Of the two, “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is the more popular. I read it as a senior in high school, you might have too. It gets referenced in pop-culture all the time. The term “big brother” is a part of our lexicon. But, of the two books, “Brave New World” actually predicted the 21st century. Orwell got it wrong. Huxley got closer to being right.

Orwell, writing after WW2 and on the cusp of the Cold War, thought the danger of the future was that everyone in the Western world would be subjected to centralized control. He saw the dark side of Europe’s socialization and thought Great Britain was only a few strongmen away from Stalin’s Russia. Huxley, writing right after the roaring 20’s and doing a lot of LSD, predicted we’d ALLOW ourselves to become subjected. We’d be subjected to entertainment and substances and jerking off to virtual reality. Who got it right?

CBS made an actual really popular reality show called “Big Brother” where all the contestants were spied on for a period of their lives…but millions of people who “Liked” that show on Facebook probably got their data sold to Cambridge Analytica who profiled them and helped Donald Trump be president…and they did it freely and willingly. Oh, the irony.

And this gets to “F451.” I’ll opine briefly on what makes this a bad film: Michael Shannon looks like he doesn’t care; the director tries to play to Michael B. Jordan’s strengths, which is just, like…punching things…but it shows what I’ve suspected all along, which is that MBJ can only play the lead if the lead is “disgruntled black youth”; the directing looks like a result of what would happen if you repeatedly say “we’ll fix this in post”; and, most egregiously, the writing just makes the source material look worse than it already was.

“F451” envisions a world in which authoritarian rule robs us of the essential tools that make us a free society. The ghost of Donald J. Trump looms large over this film. But guess what…Bradbury was, well, wrong. The real problem isn’t that Trump is yelling “Fake News” and burning books; the problem is that, as Pew and Jimmy Kimmel have pointed out, 1 in 4 Americans just haven’t read a book in the past year. And I agree with Kimmel—that number seems low (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJdNrCeUdhc). Trump doesn’t really need to burn our books…no one is reading them anyway.

And one more thing that bothered me about this movie—this is freaking HBO…you can do whatever the hell you want to on that network. Kill some people…really violently. Show some naked people. I don’t know, do something to make the audience say, “Oh, this is interesting.” Instead, “F451” commits the cardinal sin of pop culture movies…it’s just boring. I think you could actually make a good film out of this book…if I had to choose someone to make it, I’d choose Paul Verhoeven. Nobody does authoritarian films like Verhoeven and “F451” might have actually been good with hi behind the camera.

It would be my hope that this horrible adaptation would finally wake everyone up and we’d trade in our Bradbury for some truly interesting science fiction like William Gibson or David Mitchell. Ala

Reply
Lane
6/8/2018 07:20:24 am

Alas, many teachers will continue to assign “Fahrenheit 451” and many high school students will continue to not read it, put in on their shelves next to the unread copies of “Atlas Shrugged” and, instead, binge Fortnite and The Voice and the irony of it all is that Huxley is laughing from the grave.

Grade: D

Reply
Cooker
6/11/2018 11:54:11 am

As someone with an English degree, I highly frown upon movies that stray far away from the original source's content. I hadn't read Fahrenheit 451 since either middle school or high school, so I didn't quite remember a bulk of the plot, but I was pretty sure while watching the movie, that what I saw wasn't it. And what they did do, wasn't good. Read (or reread) the book. D+

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