If You Liked 'One Hundred Years of Solitude', Watch These 5 Grand-Scale Adaptations
These literary works have found new life on the screen.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is an adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez's novel of the same name, which, until recently, seemed impossible to bring to the screen.
Here are five grand adaptations that bring complex, multilayered works to the screen while preserving their spirit and scope.
5. 'Johnny Got His Gun', 1971
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 67%
Johnny Got His Gun is a modernist novel by Dalton Trumbo written in a radical, punctuation-free stream-of-consciousness style. The story follows a World War I soldier who loses his limbs, as well as his sight, hearing, smell, and speech, in a shell explosion.
The entire book is the soldier's claustrophobic internal monologue as he reflects on the war and reminisces about his past life while trapped in his own motionless body.
30 years after its publication, Trumbo took the director's chair himself. He divided the film into two contrasting worlds: the cold, monochromatic hospital reality and the warm, colorful flashes of memories and dreams.
4. 'Inherent Vice', 2014
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 73%
Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice seems tailor-made for an adaptation – it's a noir about the misadventures of a private investigator in sun-drenched 1970s California.
However, instead of a straightforward detective plot, readers encountered dead ends, absurd dialogue, and elusive narrative logic. Of course, there is also a veritable encyclopedia of underground culture from a vibrant decade.
Paul Thomas Anderson deliberately avoided simplifying the plot or allowing viewers to easily solve the mystery, instead, he opted to capture the spirit of Thomas Pynchon's novel.
3. 'Catch-22', 2019
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 84%
Joseph Heller's Catch-22 humorously exposes the paradoxes of military bureaucracy while vividly depicting the horrors and chaos of war.
The strength of the source material lies in its nonlinear structure, absurd wordplay, and strange tone that straddles dark humor and anti-militaristic drama about the absurd and horrific ways a soldier's life can end.
While not perfect, the 2019 miniseries captured the cyclical and nonlinear nature of the novel. The creators chronologically unraveled the plot without losing its toxic essence: dark humor, insane bureaucracy, and a death spiral that has become almost automatic.
2. 'Orlando', 1992
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 85%
Although Orlando is considered one of Virginia Woolf's most accessible novels, the uninitiated reader may still have trouble with its poetic style and essay-like reflections.
For years, filmmakers were daunted by the book's lack of drama and abstract concepts: the protagonist lives for three and a half centuries, changes gender mid-narrative, and never ages while eras and rulers change around them.
Sally Potter approached the adaptation with audacity, excising the endless philosophical monologues and shifting the focus to the star of the movie: Tilda Swinton, with her otherworldly and androgynous presence, frequently breaks the fourth wall to offer wry commentary on the proceedings.
1. 'Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell', 2015
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 92%
The novel presents an alternate history of Britain in which magic was lost by the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Due to its unique texture, Susanna Clarke's monumental text seemed unsuitable for the screen.
The book's language is stylized after 19th-century authors and a quarter of the novel consists of fictional bibliographies, explanations of folklore, and biographies of magicians in the form of footnotes.
Adapting this story would've required stripping it of its stylization, resulting in a bland costume drama. However, the miniseries format allowed the creators to retain Clarke's pace and rhythm. Most importantly, it allowed to recreate the academic routine of the characters and the secular life of 19th-century England.
