This week is all about movies adapted from books I read in prison. My actual literary analysis will probably be pretty slender, though. I read hundreds of books while I was down, and for a while I had a period of completing two per week. In addition to the usual prison inactivity, you have to remember that I experienced a chunk of incarceration during the pandemic. All that time in your bunk, you need books to survive. Either that, or you’re really getting along well with your cellmates. And would that necessarily be good news for you? As always, watch your company.
A family member sent me a paperback of Ann Patchett’s 2001 novel “Bel Canto” when I was in county jail, and I devoured it. I found it refreshingly uplifting, which was valuable when I originally went down and was basically spending every day inside the pit of despair. It felt accessible but also somewhat highbrow, so I do recall thinking it would be a rather sophisticated movie in the hands of the right filmmaker. Unfortunately, they picked the guy who made Jason Biggs hump pastry.
Paul Weitz moved on from co-directing “American Pie” with brother Chris to build a blandly generic directing career. His best work with Chris was the touching “About A Boy” (also an adaptation, this time of a Nick Hornby book), but he also helmed such middling fare for no one like “American Dreamz” and “Admission”, and he took a paycheck to do the nigh-unwatchable “Little Fockers”. Not my first choice for this material, frankly.
“Bel Canto” is a not-obviously-linear tale of an unlikely culture clash. Julianne Moore, ostensibly the film’s lead even though the book is an ensemble story, is an opera singer invited to perform a private concert in a mansion in South America for a wealthy Japanese industrialist and his 1%-er friends. This multinational coalition, which includes a few recognizable characters actors but also the Highlander himself Christopher Lambert, is unprepared for a deadly coup. They’re soon taken hostage by South American terrorists who demand the release of their incarcerated accomplices and allies. Notable among the terrorists is Tenoch Huerta as their leader – you may recognize him as Namor from “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”, and here he gives off a sexy intensity you didn’t see in that Marvel movie.
In the book, you become aware of this evolving situation as an ecosystem. Many of the party’s residents don’t speak the same language, and while the guerilla fighters are aggressive in their demands, a few form poker-faced allegiances with their victims. You become aware of the complexity of terrorism when there are feet on the ground, when it’s one person to another, and that the world is rarely an “us vs. one specific other type of person” scenario but likely a collection of interlocking alliances, most of them made just to make the day go by. Like prison!
The movie is a bit more basic. It largely focused on the seemingly doomed relationship between the opera singer and the industrialist, played by a dapper Ken Watanabe. In the book, Hosokawa is presented as mild-mannered, unassuming, not necessarily sexually appealing. So of course, in Watanabe, Hollywood cast the only Japanese actor that contemporary American films have been interested in sexualizing. When he is in the same frame as Moore, you see the two of them together and think, of course. Attractive couples in Hollywood are like gravity. It’s inevitable that these two forces will attract.
Weitz handles the material with taste, and “Bel Canto” is never embarrassing – I certainly felt that someone could have made a much less respectful adaptation of this novel. But Weitz can’t resist the sentimentality of the lives of the soldiers, which play out as dim melodrama. There are hidden romances, there are class-conscious interactions between the rich and the poor, and there are thorny diplomatic relations. At one point, there is a build to an iffy David Byrne-type participatory concert, and it feels just on the side of too-much.
If you know someone who is incarcerated, you really should send them a few books. Many county jails will allow you to receive books from home if they are softcover. Depending on your institution, they may or may not accept hardcovers, and the places that don’t may throw the books out, return to sender, or merely cut off the cover in question. In the feds, they exclusively accept books straight from the vendors. If you take this path, I highly recommend abebooks.com and thriftbooks.com to find used books of all kinds, as they have a considerable amount of choices that are affordable enough for you to buy in bulk.
But don’t go crazy. Each institution sets a limit as to how many books an inmate can receive per day. And in many institutions, you are only allowed to possess ten books in your personal property. Most of the time, this rule goes ignored, and people are free to pile up all their books in their locker. But if you find yourself under even the smallest amount of scrutiny, be warned that the guards will find any reason to seize your extra books. Protect them, and keep safe.