Book vs. Movie: Gulliver's Travels
By Russ Bickerstaff
December 28, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.
Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Movie.
Gulliver’s Travels
In the early 18th century, British satirist Jonathan Swift wrote a fantastical travelogue that quickly became immensely popular. Writing under the pen-name Lemuel Gulliver, Swift told of a series of expeditions to strange new worlds — islands on an Earth that was even then beginning to shrink considerably. More than simple fantasy writing, Swift’s novel was a heavy and intricate satire on politics, religion and other vices. The real stroke of genius that Swift managed with Gulliver’s Travels was its universality. Yes, there were comic elements aimed quite squarely at established power structures, but the elements of fantasy written into the story also hold an appeal to young readers. What’s more, the satire itself is universal enough that its deeper concerns continue to be relevant today.
The story has been adapted into a variety of different forms over the years, most recently in a big-budget film version brought to the screen by 20th Century Fox. Directed by a man known for animated features (Rob Letterman of Shark Tale and Monsters vs. Aliens,) the film stars Jack Black as the title character. The film opened a dismal seventh place on Christmas Day. With some industry insiders estimating the budget somewhere in the $90-$110 million range, the film is already registering as a colossal flop. A classic work of literature that hasn’t gone out of print in over a quarter-millennium vs. a film not likely to be in theaters for much longer than a month. How do the two compare?
The Book
A staggeringly prolific writer, Anglo-Irish Jonathan Swift wrote a great many things. A tireless intellectual, Swift wrote pamphlets, poems and books. What with politics being what they were in the early-to-mid-18th century, Swift had been known to write under various pen names in order to avoid an unwanted attention. Foremost among Swift’s major works, Gulliver’s Travels (originally published under the title Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World) is a staggeringly clever work still capable of holding a reader’s imagination more than a couple of centuries after it was first published in 1726.
The book opens with a quick look into the life history of the fictional narrator. Swift wastes little time getting his protagonist on a boat, which promptly crashes. He awakens to find himself captive to a small civilization of people who are very, very short — the tallest among them being no more than six inches tall. Having some difficulty with the language at first, Gulliver comes to understand that he has been taken prisoner by the miniature nation of Lilliput. When Gulliver manage to convince his captors that he means the no harm, he is treated as a guest of honor who is quickly drawn into the politics of the miniature nation and its rival nation of equal stature — Blefuscu.
Bits of the book can come across a bit dry. Swift seems to take great pleasure in describing things in great detail. In places, Swift’s exhaustive descriptions are extremely effective at drawing in a reader, but the author’s relentless pursuit of detail makes for a very unevenly paced story. Swift’s biggest success will all of the excessive description lies in his ability to make the fantasy seem believable.
The politics of Lilliput are, of course, hopelessly convoluted. The two major political parties seem drawn entirely from the technique one should use when cracking open an egg. Those who believe an egg should be cracked on the large end are mortal enemies of those who believe an egg should be cracked on the small end. Swift populates Lilliput with numerous such absurdities. It’s a lot of fun when it’s not tedious. As Gulliver gets more and more entrenched in local politics, he quickly becomes a major weapon against the enemy nation of Belfuscu. In a storyline that predates the invention of nuclear weapons by over 200 years, Gulliver uses his tremendous size to quickly win a naval battle against Blefuscu. When he refuses to help the Lilliputians completely overtake Blefuscu, things begin to get a bit sour. It isn’t long before Gulliver manages to find a way off the island — which launches the tale into its second of four parts.
With naval conditions being particularly rough, Gulliver is forced to weigh anchor in an unknown land, which ends up being populated by giants. The land of Brobdingnag consists of those over 70 feet tall. No less fantastic than his time in Lilliput, Gulliver’s fortunes are reversed. Here he is something of a curiosity — no longer the major, influential force he had become between Lilliput and Blefuscu.
As things progress, Gulliver is captured again and rediscovered by sailors bound for England - a journey cut short by attacking pirates who strand him on an island. He is soon rescued by an island in the sky — a nation known as Laputa. It is devoted to music and mathematics, but completely incapable of finding any practical use for such things. And so the adventure continues.
Gulliver’s journeys cover a lot of thematic space. Numerous intellectual concerns are raised in the book in interesting ways. At its best, these relatively dull moments of academic intellectual pursuits are paired against a backdrop of some fantastic land. Appealing to both intellectuals and those interested in a good adventure, the book does an admirable job of reaching both audiences.
The Movie
The film distances itself from Swift’s book right away. Set in contemporary times, the film stars Jack Black as a slacker who works in the mailroom for a newspaper in New York. The character of Gulliver in the book is never explored in all that much depth beyond what happens to him. Far more character-based, the film spends the first third of its roughly 90 minutes establishing the character of Gulliver before he embarks on his journey. While not entirely at ease here, Black delivers a screen presence that’s charming enough to carry a more character-driven adaptation of the story. We meet Black’s Gulliver as he is showing around a new employee who will be working with him. Black’s slacker personality is contrasted against the upward mobility of his savvy of his trainee. A failed attempt at asking out the editor of the travel section turns into an assignment to travel to the Bermuda Triangle as a travel writer. This finds Gulliver traveling alone on a tiny boat into extremely bad weather. When he wakes, he has been tied down by Lilliputians and we are just over a half an hour into the film.
Here as in the book, Gulliver starts off on the wrong foot with the Lilliputians. Gulliver’s captors in the film lack much of the hospitality of their literary counterparts. They also speak English, which spares the tedious work of trying to get communication going. Black’s slacker Gulliver endears himself to the Lilliputians through putting out a fire in a rather unique way and single-handedly defeating the armada of Blefuscu. The minute specifics of Lilliputian culture are more or less avoided along with much of the rest of the book’s intellectual satire. The comedy and drama of the film rests almost entirely in and within the characters. A love story between a commoner and a princess parallels Gulliver’s attraction for the travel editor he’s trying to impress. Love conquers all, even in the face of aggression, jealousy and bad decisions. An uninspired Hollywood romantic comedy is superimposed over nearly timeless socio-political satire.
What the film lacks in satirical depth, it more than makes up for in pacing. Swift’s novel had a nebulous pacing that dragged from plot point to plot point. Bearing the factory stamp of a standard Hollywood adventure comedy, the film solders itself to what feels like a very standard three-act plot structure. This may not be the most breathtaking way of delivering an epic adventure to the screen, but it makes for a more engrossing experience overall.
Where the book is content to be clever and fantastical in great detail for a weighty number of pages, the film has places to go, things to do and demographics to appeal to. In the first act, we see a lovable slacker thrust into an adventure. In the second act, we see that slacker become the heroic champion of those people by averting fiery disaster and securing a major naval victory. That second act (roughly 30-60 minutes into the story) more closely resembles the book than the rest of film. The final half hour sees a high-ranking Lilliputian siding with the Blefuscudians in a successful effort to banish Gulliver to Brobdingnag. The land of giants isn’t given much space in the film at all. Gulliver’s lies to the Lilliputians about his stature in New York and his life’s accomplishments are revealed in a dramatic moment. His love interest, having discovered lies of a different kind, has traveled out to become stranded on Lilliput and become a prisoner there. Gulliver feels insignificant — a feeling that is mirrored in his stature on the Brobdingnag as he becomes a doll for a young girl. Naturally, everything works out in the end. This is a Hollywood film after all.
The Verdict
Though slow and plodding, Jonathan Swift’s original novel held just enough innovation to make it a classic. As the book is buried in very specific and intricate satire, it doesn’t seem likely that Swift was making a deliberate effort to appeal to a wide range of readers with the novel. In spite of this, the book has had the kind of universal appeal reserved for those works that have achieved success all over the world. By contrast, the film seems to be deliberately reaching for a universal audience in a very awkward way. The romantic comedy element seems to be reaching for date movie status while the humor feels quite squarely aimed at sixth grade boys. It’s a bit difficult to discern exactly who the film is being aimed at. As the film limited itself to the first two parts of the book, a sequel could, theoretically, have covered the final two parts of the book. It’d be interesting to see Jack Black explore the character a little more, but as the film is likely to be one of the bigger flops of 2010, Black will need to seek commercial success elsewhere.