Imitation is the sincerest form of artistic flattery. The great age of literary imitation in this country was the 18th century - the "Augustan" period. Poets such as Pope, Dryden and Johnson took it on themselves to "English" and modernise the ancient classics: Virgil, Homer, Juvenal, Horace.
It would overstate things to say we are living through something equivalent in film. It's more a flavour of the month thing. None the less, over the past few years, movie-makers have exerted themselves to "cinema" a corpus of classic literary texts. It goes beyond mere adaptation. Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility (1995) takes liberties with Jane Austen's text, but remains faithful to Regency period, costume, dramatis personae and the novel's dialogue. Clueless (1995), by contrast, is transparently derived from Austen's Emma, but transposed to a Valley-girl, Beverly High setting.
Emma was still there in Amy Heckerling's script, but as a kind of floating essence. One smelled it on the film, like some expensive fragrance. It was a new and rather flattering experience for 1990s audiences. Once you caught on, you felt exceptionally sophisticated - a literate film-goer, capable of relishing sly in-jokes that the director was directing in your direction. Clueless was also, in its own right, a witty comedy of southern California manners (in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer class, I would say, and a cut or two above Prom Night).
The runaway success of Clueless has been one trigger for the current vogue for "versioning" (as literary critics like to call it). Another was the successful 1988 versioning of Dickens's A Christmas Carol as Scrooged (starring Bill Murray as the old skinflint in modern TV producer clothes). The bandwagon rolled on with Great Expectations (frosty Gwyneth Paltrow, lusty Ethan Hawke, grizzled De Niro as an improbable Magwitch) and 10 Things I Hate About You, the 1999 update of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, transposed, like Clueless, to the scatty world of the American high school.
The most complex of these recent versionings is A Thousand Acres (1997). Jocelyn Moorhouse's film is an adaptation (fairly faithful) of Jane Smiley's novel, itself a modern recasting of Shakespeare's King Lear. Old man, three daughters, time to split up the estate, trouble.
There must have been an elite in the audience who both knew the play and had read the 1992 novel. Watching the film was, in fact, something of a critical ordeal because, if you were really hip to this kind of thing, you would also be running Kurosawa's versioning of Lear, Ran (1985), through your head. One staggered out of the cinema after watching A Thousand Acres aesthetically knackered. Movies really shouldn't be such hard work.
My own preference is for versionings that make the audience work a bit for the payoff. Films, that is, whose core literary in spiration is not released as part of the advertising package. The Coen brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou?, was, one gradually apprehended, based on the Odyssey. But so delicate were the Homeric allusions (as in John Goodman's cyclopean eye, or the slag-sirens in the river) that one was never quite sure. Perhaps those naughty Coens were pulling our leg? Surely this belly-laugh Grapes of Wrath burlesque couldn't be a homage to the noblest of literary epics? Could it?
My favourite versioning film just about makes it into the third division of cult classics. Marco Brambilla's Demolition Man (1993), starring Wesley Snipes and Sylvester Stallone, transposes Aldous Huxley's Brave New World to southern California ("San Angeles"), 30 years hence, after the Big One. As in Huxley's dystopia, it's a world without conflict or friction.
The Stallone character, John Spartan (John Savage in the book), is thawed out of his cryo-penitentiary to perform his usual bull-in-a-china-shop act. Conflict and friction up the kazoo. It's very funny, not least because Stallone seems to be laughing at his own Rambo excesses. But since Huxley's novel is still in copyright (unlike King Lear) the film-makers were careful to keep any parallels at the level of subtext. The effect was delicious: Demolition Man was Die Hard crude and Citizen Kane subtle at the same time.
All of which brings us to The Claim, a versioning of Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge. There's no question where this movie is coming from. Pre-release publicity has hammered home the point. The novel, published in 1886, is one of Hardy's "satires of circumstance" ("life's a bitch, and then you die").
A vagrant farm labourer, Michael Henchard, gets drunk at a fair in early 19th-century Wessex and sells his wife and child to a passing sailor. Hardy picked the story up from old newspapers. When he sobers up, Henchard swears off drink for 21 years and goes to a distant part of the west country. By way of hard work and ruthlessness he monopolises the corn wholesaling trade in the town of Casterbridge and becomes its mayor. It is the early 1840s, and Wessex - protected by the Corn Laws - is the bread basket of England.
Enter a new man, Donald Farfrae, a Scot on his way to Canada's prairies (the world's bread basket, as they will be). Fatally, Henchard befriends Farfrae. Hardy's is a Darwinian universe. The new man must destroy the old. It's the law of life. Farfrae usurps Henchard's business and succeeds him as mayor.
Fate - as remorseless as in Greek tragedy - plays its part. The sold wife, now a widow, returns. The great circle turns, Henchard dies what he was 21 years before: a drunk and a day-labourer. It being Hardy, there is a further irony. In 1846, a couple of years on, the Corn Laws will be repealed. Farfrae too will be destroyed and with him, Wessex prosperity. Life sucks.
The British director of The Claim, Michael Winterbottom, and his British script writer, Frank Cottrell Boyce, have transposed Hardy's story to a later period, the 1860s (the time of the great transcontinental American railroad) and another west country - Sierra Nevada. The lineaments of the plot are the same, although names have been changed. Daniel Dillon, a "forty-niner", sells his wife. He strikes it rich and rules over the town he has made, Kingdom Come. Enter the New Man, Dalglish, a surveyor laying the railway. Enter the sold wife. So it goes.
The makers of the film have retained Hardy's Darwinism, but give it - perversely - a final upbeat spin. Producers hate unhappy endings. The achievement of Winterbottom's film is essentially visual. It is a photographer's movie. What the audience takes away from the film is a series of vivid snapshots - many (as in Gladiator) the product of computer-generated imagery.
The narrative is dominated by panoramic snowscapes (there's more ankle-deep trudging in this movie than in Scott of the Antarctic). There's a pièce de résistance sequence in which Dillon's house is physically moved, like a gigantic wedding cake, to its new location. Old towns are burned down, new towns spring up in stunning montage. At times, one can't believe one's eyes. A price is paid. The story, Hardy's story, is buried in all the visual effect, like a flower in a snowdrift.
The Claim is a ponderous, self-important film, which is glorious to look at. Myself, I prefer Demolition Man. What do we go to the movies for? Literature?
• The Claim is released tomorrow. John Sutherland's edition of The Mayor of Casterbridge is published by Signet Classics.
