25th Estate: Casting The Corrections

2009 was slated to be the year we finally got to see the Lamberts on screen; however reports from inside the industry increasingly suggest this to be over-optimistic. But what exactly is taking so long? The novel, first published in 2001, was optioned the same year, and said to be in pre-production the following spring. Stephen Daldry, who just directed the brilliant and award winning The Reader (also a book to film adaptation) was placed to helm it, only recently to have been replaced by Robert Zemeckis. Eight years on, and still no sign of a release date: There is no only additional information offered by IMDB, not even a rumoured casting.

One might suspect it to be the complexity of the material itself that’s causing problems; spanning almost 700 pages, the book can’t compact easily into a multiplex-friendly 120 minutes. However, this much we know: the screenplay has been written, by the excellent David Hare — also responsible for turning another of our books, Michael Cunningham’s, The Hours, which also follows separate characters through individual strands, into an Oscar winning screenplay, so presumably no problems there.

The task of a story broken up into separate strands following different characters may have seemed like a challenge a couple of decades ago, but theories in books like Everything Bad is Good for You increasingly suggest that TV and film consumers not only cope with complex storylines, but actually require them to maintain interest; having trained their brains on TV shows – even mainstream ones like 24 and LOST – to expect loose ends rather than dainty knots. Many successful recent movies, like Magnolia, Amores Perros and Crash have required viewers to follow different plots before explaining how they tie together, so the structure of The Corrections should not be the thing holding it back.

Perhaps, then, we are to assume it is the casting that is causing the delay; we have evidence to suggest this has not yet been finalised, since IMDB prides itself on posting details as soon as they’re confirmed. Of all the many things that Franzen’s book got lauded for on initial release, the close observation of characters surely ranked among the highest. While many literary novels place a greater emphasis on character than on plot, few so closely realize theirs to such an extent that you feel personally connected to them as in The Corrections. Many readers of the books felt that Enid, Alfred, Chip, Gary and Denise literally leapt of the page; more than that, they recognized them.

Quite a task, then, to find actors to portray them.

Readers of books often disagree with casting choices made by film executives, at least in pat because the distance between the written word and the imagination of the readers creates a disparity. But the close proximity of reader to character in this book might provide particular casting difficulties, and whilst movie adaptations always risk alienating a section of the original book audience, the wrong casting decisions here could risk alienating the whole.

Much has been said in recent months about the dubious wisdom of the crowds. Martin Lindstrom, in his book Buyology argued as early as the subtitle that ‘Everything we think about why we buy is wrong’ or – what is the point in market research, when we delude ourselves about our purchasing decisions? But, perhaps, if the point of a film adaptation of a book is at least in part to draw some of the crowd of the original fans, listening to their opinion in this matter wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

It is said that the internet makes an armchair critic out of everyone, and never has this been truer than in the case of movie casting. Comic book fans have been posting on forums for years about who the perfect actors for Batman or Gambit would be; IMDB is full of ‘Who would you cast posts’ and ‘it should have been X’ comments.

Official rumoured casting for The Corrections has Judi Dench as the family matriarch Enid, along with Brad Pitt, Tim Robbins, and Naomi Watts as her children, whilst on Franzen’s wish list Gene Hackman plays Alfred and Cate Blanchett Alfred’s daughter, Denise. However, on the website Imagine Casting, where fans of books or comics can place their wish lists of actors for the movie adaptations, it is Ellen Burstyn, Paul Newman, Jennifer Connelly, John Cusack (as Chip) and Tim Robbins that come out on top.

Now, ruling out Paul Newman, due to his terribly sad, recent death, I don’t think these are bad shouts. We’ve already seen Ellen Burstyn do neurotic and fussy in Requiem for a Dream, Jennifer Connelly be the driven career woman in Little Children, John Cusack as eternal college grad, job hating, commitment phobe in High Fidelity (and any number of other films) and Tim Robbins as dissatisfied in marriage and paranoid in various. The fact that Tim Robbins appears on both the rumoured official list and amongst the fan’s choices is surely fodder enough to fuel further investigation. What the fan’s cast list has also managed to do, amazingly, that adds weight to the value of the crowd sourcing phenomenon, is to pick two actors (Connelly and Cusack) that make physically convincing siblings.

So what do you think? Who do you think has the right or the skill to pick the casts of movies? And, if you had this responsibility in the case of The Corrections, who would you cast?