I've been making the most of my Netflix account since I reopened it, watching classic movies I haven't seen before. Since Hollywood just keeps remaking the same movies over and over again, I should just spend time with the originals. Usually they're so much better, on smaller budgets, smaller sets, and no special effects.
So I was excited to see "The Old Man and the Sea" staring Spencer Tracy. Hemingway is one of my favorite authors, and it's one of my favorite stories by him. Consider too, I'm recently interested in fishing, so this was a confluence of several things I love. How could it not be good?
I guess my expectations were too high.
The film was an absolute mess, and ruined Hemingway's book. Those who have read anything by Hemingway know that his prose is stripped bare, down to the very essentials of the story. Hemingway never wanted to waste even one word, and this works exceptionally well for "The Old Man and the Sea."
The sparseness of the prose perfectly reflects the empty barren life of the old man living in poverty in Cuba. The emptiness in the writing conveys the endless featureless sea. The constant muscular forward rhythm of the story underscores the relentless and painful pull of the marlin dragging the Old Man further and further out to sea, away from home, away from land, away from everything he knows. Like the sea, the life of the old man is all internal and underneath the surface. The man fishes the sea, and is the sea himself. He can no longer be separated from it, and his identity has been consumed by it. But none of this is spelled out for you. None of this is laid out for you. You must ride the wives with Santiago and struggle with him as he pulls in the fish.
But this 1958 version of the movie turns it into some sentimental schmaltz, like a Disney movie, or an over the top Willie Wonka confection, neither of which I have a problem with, but it's not right for this story. "The Old Man and the Sea" did not deserve this fate. Swelling strings, cute children, longing looks, montages of running through scenic backdrops of sea-side Havana. A stirring romantic moment of locked eyes between young boy and the cafe owner's daughter. None of this needed to exist in this movie. Hemingway did not put any of this in this story. This story is manly, in that Johnny Cash and John Wayne bruising knuckles in a bar fight over spilled whiskey kind of way. The fishermen don't talk of women, they talk of baseball stars. The boy looks up to the old man as a grandfather and teacher. There'd be no swelling strings in their life, only the hard plucked guitar of a man's man like Hank Williams Sr (RIP you son of a bitch). In fact, the era of Hank Williams Sr is the same time frame as this story. Let that vision guide where the story should have been.
Now picture Disney's Anne of Green Gables instead. The jarring distance between what should have been and what was was so painful as to almost make the movie unwatchable.
It'd be easy to point to other movies of the time and say that that's the way all movies were made, but that's not true. There are plenty of movies that were comfortable using silence, even more comfortable than most modern films. For example, "M" is a movie that lives in almost complete silence.
Worse yet, the movie has a narrator, which was not strictly necessary. Worse yet, like some Christmas movie, the narrator (also Spencer Tracy) speaks to the characters in the movie like a caring, paternalistic God. You feel like he's got some warmth and affection for the people on the screen. Gosh, he really does care about us, doesn't he?
There is no such God in the book. The narrator of the book is a passionless reporter, feeding you the rawest details of the man's life. When the old man catches and eats raw dolphin to stay alive pulled further out to sea by the marlin you can taste the old man's revulsion, strip by strip by strip. You can see in your mind the bloody wounds on the man's cramped claw-like hands as he struggles to keep hold of the fish. You get the most direct sense of the effort he goes through to stay alive alone and out to see, just the old man, the fish, and the sea.
Instead, in the movie, we get a homogenized and sentimental vignette which makes the ravages of a hard life and age seem nothing harder than a day at Universal Studios. "Come ride the 'Old Man & The Sea Ride!' Fight off starvation, exposure, and shark attacks in the most thrilling five minutes of your life!" Except, somehow, I think the ride at Universal would be truer to the story, and more interesting to boot.
Clearly, I was disappointed in a way I did not expect.
But all is not lost. There is another version, staring Anthony Quinn from 1990 that I have queued up. Expect a review of that in a few days.
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