Ready to Die: London Fields (2018)
The real death in this adaptation of a neo-noir murder mystery is the novel it’s based on.
Is there such a thing as an unfilmable novel? A book that can only tell its story in the written word and resists any visual interpretation? There has yet to be an adaptation of any of J.D. Salinger’s work, but there will always be a director willing to take a chance on the most arthouse of literature. And when the author is willing to write the adaptation of his novel for the silver screen himself, it should be easy sailing — right? Enter London Fields (2018) probably one of the worst adaptations of a great novel ever made. Martin Amis’ 1990 novel is both a satire and noir turned inside out, where the death of one femme fatale and death of the planet are the same thing. The film, plagued by legal controversies, was finally released to staggeringly bad reviews which indicated that it probably should have stayed on the shelf — or, even better, on the page.
The Story
After terminally ill writer Samson Young (Billy Bob Thornton) trades apartments with successful and sexy British writer Mark Asprey (Jason Issacs) he meets his neighbor Nicola Six (Amber Heard). the archetypal seductress who foresees her own death when she walks into the local pub. She knows when and how she will die; she just doesn’t know the identity of the murderer. But Nicola has narrowed it down to three men: scuzzy con man and darts player Keith Talent (appallingly overacted by Jim Sturgess) or upper-crust sucker Guy Clinch (Theo James) or Samson himself. Nicola runs headlong towards her fate, thoughtfully providing all the men with motives for her murder, and allowing Samson to mine her story for the ultimate novel. In the background, the world is facing a devastating ecological crisis but as anarchy, spreads through London, everyone is just consumed with their usual business.
The Adaptation
London Fields is not an easy novel to categorize. It’s a murder mystery where all the detection occurs before the murder; its a noir film where the femme fatale’s only purpose is die. It’s a nihilistic thriller where capitalism, nuclear war and the rape of the environment result in a literal world collapse which nonetheless is nothing but background noise for the class warfare in grimy London neighborhood (one that became posh and fashionable by the time of the movie’s release). Amis has an uncanny ear for language and slang — both in sleazy back alleys and in fine country estates — his prose is as dense as Dickens and just thorough in plumbing the depths of society’s dregs. The novel’s characters are determined to stay unlikable and all the information — from the narrators or the news — is completely unreliable. What makes London Fields so startling and compulsively readable is how vivid the world is, even when surrounded by death; Amis revels in details that contrast London’s ancient history and dystopian future. You can read the book as a reverse murder mystery, or as a commentary on the permanence of class warfare, but the confidence and nerve of the plot are mesmerizing.
From the beginning, the adaptation was plagued with problems. The director sued the producers for not paying him. The producers sued the actress for conspiring to make changes to the script. The actress countersued claiming that the filmmakers used an unauthorized body double to add more nude scenes to the movie. The debut at the 2015 Toronto Film Festival was cancelled and the film wasn’t released until 3 years later. Bizarre scenes were added cross cutting 9/11 with pornography and Mecca with mind control. When it was finally released, it earned a rare 0% on Rotten Tomatoes and had what was considered the worst major studio opening ever.
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact problem because there are so many. The movie is garish and crude, with Amis’s characters too bizarre to even be caricatures of real people. And while Amis’s depiction of Nicola did fall prey to the usual misogynistic tropes of the femme fatale, he did write a character with who was both savagely intelligent and gifted at psychological manipulation. But Heard, though beautiful, is even more one-dimensional than the average femme fatale; she looks perpetually bored, her actions are inexplicable and she has the sexual charm of a model in the Victoria’s Secret catalog. Billy Bob Thornton is subdued as the dying Samson who is obsessed with the far more successful author whose house he is staying. And the less said about Jim Sturgess’ cartoonish portrayal of Talent the better; Talent is the richest and most dominant character in the novel, its seedy, emotional core, and Sturgess makes him the opposite: a twitching, unintelligible, mouth-breather that makes one wonder if Sturgess was trying to single-handedly tank the movie himself.
Don’t worry though; there are a lot of reasons this fails. The director, Matthew Cullen, is primarily a director of music videos and it shows; instead of being baroque and rich, the scenes are lurid, with clashing colors that make them uncomfortable to watch. Scenes that should be campy are instead presented as deeply meaningful and symbolic, while scenes that representing the main themes of the novel are treated as superficially as possible. The setting is gross and seedy while rendered like a glossy Hollywood blockbuster. And whatever Johnny Depp is doing here, even one of his trademark quirky characters can’t ake
While the novel manages to balance the fate of the world with the murder that will eventually happen, nothing in the movie feels remotely real. This is a travesty and fundamental betrayal of Amis, whose writing evokes the very smells and textures of the world’s he creates. The only hope for this movie is that it becomes the kind of trashy bad movie that is a guilty pleasure, but there’s no enjoyment of even that kind to be had here. It’s unbelievable that Amis wrote the screenplay himself; even his own words seem suddenly out of place. What required a deft touch and a talent for the surreal (we will always mourn that David Cronenberg bowed out of directing the adaptation) is essentially an exercise in tackiness and fortitude: how much can you stand before you give up? Adapting a good novel is hard enough, but it’s rare that an adaptation is this bad; by intentionally destroying everything clever, subtle and compelling in the novel, the movie becomes its exact antithesis.
