DANIEL
The New Republic Inc.
By Stanley Kauffman
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1983
That was the title of my review of E. L. doctorow's novel, The Book of Daniel (TNR, June 5, 1971); at one point Daniel says of his father, "He wrestled society for my soul." The patent model for the book was the Rosenberg case, but it is not about the Rosenbergs. It could not be viewed then as a roman a clef, and it cannot be reassessed now in the light of new data. It is a work of imagination: what it would be like to be a son (and brother of the daughter) of people like the Rosenbergs, a son living in the late 1960s with various planes of the past constantly intersecting the present. I thought, and think, that Doctorow wrote the American political novel of the age.
Lately he wrote a screenplay of the novel. Now the film itself makes it necessary to tell the screenwriter that he hasn't served the novelist well. (When Doctorow's subsequent novel Ragtime was filmed in 1981--a book at least as good as The Book of Daniel, a film considerably worse--the screenplay was by someone else.) Any argument about the changes needed for the film medium won't begin to wash: why didn't those needs hamper Peter Handke and Andre Malraux, among others, in writing screenplays of their novels? Doctorow's screenplay is severely reductive of his novel, and no one can possibly know this better than himself.
Begin with the title. Apparently some unwritten law says that you can't call a film The Book of. . . , so the title becomes mere Daniel. This is a significant stricture. The man who chose the original title, who chose everything carefully in his novel, presumably had two reasons for it. First, the Old Testament resonance, the suggestion of prophetic mission and of the Jewishness specific to the material. Second, the essence of the novel. That essence is the writing of a book within the novel. Daniel's attempt to write that book is the dynamics of what goes on in Doctorow's book, an attempt that summons up Daniel's "present" actions, his memories, his imaginings. But the film, from the title on, has no hint of this propellant interior action, no hint that it is Daniel's venture into creation, his act of imaginative summoning, that spills history into the "present", and vice versa.
This omission leads seamlessly to the second fault. The omission of imaginative texture strips Doctorow's work to the narrative, which is substantively retained, and the narrative can't bear the emphasis. The novel has no new insights into the Rosenbergs as such, not even any useful guesses. It doen't even have a fixed finish: there are three optional endings. The novel is an experdition into response: what it means to live inside the body and mind of a "Rosenberg" son, as recorded on an acute literary seismograph. Without that texture, we look for the wrong kind of revelation and are, of course, disappointed. The new stripped structure turns the work into a relatively conventional "quest" novel, with fashbacks, a quest for a buried secret. That quest was no more than an armature of Doctorow's book, not its purpose. And since the quest is doomed to discover nothing, the film is doomed to fizzle.
All that Doctorow did in his screenplay was to extract. From his novel, he took scenes, patches of dialogue, glimpses, and wove them into a relatively linear script. He shunned the very element that gave his book its textural quality. (If he really thinks that the film form demanded this renunciation, he can't have paid much attention to Pinter's Proust screenplay.) The film Daniel courses along as if it had been made from an American cousin of John Le Carre, but without a satisfactory conclusion.
Sidney Lumet directed and, for the most part, shows again that he is excellent with actors. The excellence is the film's strength; the qualification is its major weakness. For Daniel, Lumet chose Timothy Hutton, and despite all that Hutton and Lumet try, the actor cannot rise to the role. No matter how Hutton flashes his eyes and pumps up feeling, he remains pallid, two dimensional. A daniel who convinced us that he had caverns within him, that the past echoed in them, would have helped to compensate for the synoptic script. Hutton does not deliver.
His sister, driven to madness and suicide by her parents' executions twenty years after the event, is played by Amanda Plummer, who is making a specialty of psychotics on stage and screen. Plummer has a great deal of lean, sinewy intensity, but so far her most successful performance was as the young mute in The World According to Garp. Her voice couldn't intervene. Her voice is so tinny and grating that it almost obscures her image: it makes me want avert my eyes. All the inflections of feeling that her face and body suggest are virtually nullified by her peanaut-whistle voice.
The children who play the brother and sister at the time of the trial, Ilan M. Mitchell-Smith and Jena Greco, are much better than Hutton and Plummer. Those sequences in the past are a great deal more than fill-in flashbacks: the child actors are lovely, pensive, affecting.
Those young people are part of what is best in the film: the good acting. Further testament to Lument's (generally) extraordinary ability with actors is Lindsay Crouse's performance as the children's mother. Crouse, whose theater work has left me tepid, did fairly well for Lumet as the runaway Irish nurse in The Verdict. Here, as a Bronx Jewish Communist, she is excellent, strong, a pillar of fire. It's not a matter of accent and intonation only, though both are flawless: it's a matter of passionate being, right to her last utterance outside the death chamber. (She tells the prison rabbi to leave{ "Let my son be bar mitzvahed today. Let our death be his bar mitzvah.")
Mandy Patinkin, as her husband, is equally good but less surprising: his role is less of a reach for him, and he has been impressive before. As the affectionate, impulsive, humorous, apostolic father Patinkin fills the screen.
THE SCRIPT contains two risky set pieces. The children are brought to see their parents in prison. The authorities won't let the parents be in the room together, so there must be two scenes of reunion, children with the mother, children with the father. (The parents are executed in reverse order.) We know, while we're watching the first scene and admiring the way that Lumet and his actors vitalize it, that we're going to go through a parallel scene right after it. Lumet faces this challenge and, with his actors, meets it well.
Ed Asner, as the parents' lawyer, has a relatively easy role, but he doesn't coast on it: he underplays it beautifully. Ellen Barkin is rapidly becoming one of the most important young women in American films. She caught attention as the pathelic young wife in Diner; in Tender Mercies, as Duvall's daughter, she created a full and memorable charcter in a few scenes; and here, as Hutton's wife, she is immediately arresting and true. Lee Richardson, a veteran, is superb in one brief but meaty scene as The New York Times investigative reporter consulted by Hutton when the reporter writes a follow-up story, twenty years after the executions, for the paper. Virtually every word of the scene in the novel is retained in the film--it's a key scene--and Richardson gives it the rich savor of experience, the reporter's and his own.
Andrzej Bartkowiak (trained at the Lodz film school) photographed Lumet's two previous films with distinction, Prince of the City and The Verdict. His work here is good but somewhat patly labeled: past scenes are in sepia, present scenes are in full color dominated by different shades of blue. The differentiation is a bit heavy, also a bit superfluous. Lumet apparently invested most of his directorial energy in his actors; because visually the film is only occasionally striking (the children being passed over the heads of the crowd to the platform at a protest meeting for their parents). Mostly, it's merely competent. And it ends with a regrettable cliche. The camera pulls back from a 1960s protest meeting in Central Park to a very long shot; then the camera tilts up into the sky. The only fresh touch is that the sky is gray.
In Doctorow's novel, his theme is much less the Rosenberg case as such, indirectly or otherwise, than the history and fate of nineteenth-century European radicalism in twentieth-century America: the fervor with which it was brought, the occasions that fed it, the reactions it evoked, the way it was tempered and metamorphosed by American fact as our century went on. (In his subsequent novel Ragtime, he treated the theme at an earlier date, turn of the century.) A huge subject; and it evoked in him, not a fictionalized treatise but a varicolored prose poem. His screenplay loses almost all the poetic quality of the book, and we are given an inconclusive story, trimmed with utterances.
Review Grade: B-
