When Nia DaCosta took on playwright Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, she didn’t come to adapt the play. She came to reinvent it.
The result is an impressive work of technical achievement. Starring Tessa Thompson and Nina Hoss as feuding women of intimidating genius, stymied and pitted against one another by a patriarchal society, Hedda explores Ibsen’s themes of duplicity.
Namely, is the story’s focus — kept woman Hedda Gabler, trapped in an aristocratic marriage by her own mercurial impulses and outside social pressures — a villain, or victim for finding a sense of personal power in manipulating those around her? Hedda, available to stream on Prime now, asks the same question. But while keeping the basics, DaCosta’s version does away with pretty much everything else.
“It’s what keeps classical works alive. That you have to adapt it, not just for the time, but for the person that you are,” DaCosta told IndieWire about her version, which recasts Hedda as a queer Black woman in an era with little consideration for either identity.
“Not so much trying to make a beat-for-beat, faithful adaptation … I wanted to do something that was really about my reaction to it, and set it more inside of my creative space.”
In that spirit, and for your viewing pleasure, we’ve put together a masterlist of other adaptations that changed their sources to make something radically different. Maybe not always radically better, but different.
Contemporary covers
Also out this week, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia — about a conspiracy theorist who kidnaps a pharmaceutical CEO he believes to be an alien — is definitely weird. But it’s still not quite as weird as the South Korean film it’s based on, Save The Green Planet!
That original is both more disorienting in its genre melding, and more unsettling in the extremes of grotesque physical abuse it depicts. But perhaps most importantly, in updating the 2003 film for modern day, Lanthimos makes a different — and more demoralizing — point: society is already probably too fractured, atomized and decayed to save. In theatres now.
The War of the Roses, the 1989 film based on the book of the same name, told the story of Oliver and Barbara Rose. By the film’s end, Oliver simply wants to keep Barbara in his life to prove a bitter, spiteful point. Meanwhile, Barbara just wants him dead. The Roses meanwhile, takes a more nuanced approach: our unhappy Roses do still genuinely love each other — even if when they see each other’s stupid faces, it makes them sick. Buy or rent on Apple TV or buy on Prime.
Surprising source material
According to Pixar, A Bug’s Life has a simple genesis: inspired by Aesop’s fable The Ant and the Grasshopper, the 1998 animated classic tells the story of a colony of ants seeking protection from a group of bandit grasshoppers.
But according to public understanding, it is much closer to — and almost definitely inspired by — Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. Going as far back as a contemporary review from the Chicago Tribune, the “teasing hints” of how that story of resistance and resilience was obviously borrowed, and substantially remixed, have always been evident. Just with bugs. Stream on Disney+.
Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou? has the topsy-turvy feeling of a half-remembered dream told by a half-drunk poet. Which is perhaps the point: the folk-musical story of three escaped convicts hunting for buried treasure is sort of a retelling of Homer’s Odyssey.
But the directors have consistently claimed they never actually read it: therefore moving the story of a courageous, journeying warrior to the modern-ish day via conniving criminals battling sirens, the devil, the Ku Klux Klan — and a toad. Stream on Disney+.
Originally a mature, dramatic retelling of The Prince and the Pauper, almost the entirety of The Emperor’s New Groove was scrapped for its seemingly over-complex, slow-paced nature. Virtually all that would remain of its original inspiration is the pairing of a poor man (Pacha, voiced by John Goodman) and a royal (Kuzco, voiced by David Spade).
Luckily, the journey from there to here was captured in the incredible, now somewhat-banned documentary The Sweatbox, still easily watchable with a bit of internet sleuthing. Stream The Emperor’s New Groove on Disney+.
(Arguably) better than the original
Based on Hong Kong’s Internal Affairs, Martin Scorsese’s gangland-corruption drama The Departed has just a bit more vitality when set in the streets of Boston. But in an interview with Letterboxd, Scorsese and star Leo DiCaprio spoke of how the Polish film Ashes and Diamonds, about a man coerced into carrying out an assassination he doesn’t truly believe in, was a narrative source.
“The idea of [him] dealing with this moral conundrum of trying to figure out what’s right,” DiCaprio said. “The constant anxiety and internal tension that the lead character feels in that movie — I remember that was a big influence on me.” Stream The Departed on Crave, or rent on Prime or Apple TV.
The original, non-musical Little Shop of Horrors was shot on a dare, made on a budget of $15,000 US and even made its way into a Canadian festival on the 100 worst films ever made. For the musical and eventual 1986 film version, Howard Ashman and co-writer Alan Menken’s changes are huge, but amount to clarifying the structure, including giving star Seymour more character-destroying agency in killing the plant’s victims. That’s along with two new endings, the darker of which is one of the wildest finales of any major Hollywood film, ever. Available for purchase on Blu-ray, or rent at your local video store.
Regardless of whether The Innocents is better than its source material, it’s hard to argue against it surpassing the many, many other films that have tried to adapt Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. The seemingly supernatural tale of a governess and her haunted, haunting charges is suspense in its highest form: boasting (at the time) innovative filmic techniques and a supernal child-acting performance that somehow increases the terrifying moral ambiguity found in the text. And that’s ignoring the chillingly beautiful Truman Capote poem written specifically for the film. Stream on Hollywood Suite on Prime.
Underseen alternates
More-or-less based on Britain’s violent teenage apathy film Scum, Canada’s Dog Pound splits its narrative focus into three. And where the incisive, often banned original Alan Clarke and Roy Minton film took vital aim at cold, counterproductive political systems, Kim Chapiron’s update went more personal.
In sad-eyed Angel (Mateo Morales), the first of three recently incarcerated youths, we see goodness snuffed out. In Davis (Shane Kippel), the thin veil of boyish bravado is punctured to reveal the whimpering fear underneath. And in Butch (Adam Butcher), we see the wanton, terrifying violence necessary to survive such systems. Rent on Apple TV.
Famously derided, Stephen King’s The Shining is the 1997 miniseries the horror author specifically made because of how much he detested Stanley Kubrick’s version of King’s orignal book. An acquired taste of all acquired tastes, this King entry is faithful to a fault: a campy merry-go-round of overwrought performances the author intentionally drew from the actors to counter his complaint of Jack Nichoson’s portrayal being too cold.
To round out your Halloween viewing, watch to see King address his main complaint, of humanizing the author-insert character, Jack Torrance. Just… strap in. Rent or buy on Apple TV.
When tackling his 200-word storybook Where The Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendack only had two rules for screenwriter Dave Eggers and writer/director Spike Jonze: “Make it personal, and make it dangerous.”
In the end, he had other complaints — such as the Max of this tale running away from home to a fantastical land of monsters, instead of seeing his bedroom transformed. But according to Eggers and Jonze, more important than anything was finding something new.
That included a heightened sense of danger, a nested and inferred subplot of an absent father, and a story as unabashedly terrifying as the original book — and as childhood really is. Stream on Crave or rent on Apple TV.
