Atlas Shrugged Part I : The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Last night, I attended an advanced screening of Atlas Shrugged Part I at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City, California.  The film is scheduled for "wide" release on April 15.
     Prior to the screening, the film's producers, Harmon Kaslow and John Aglialoro, explained that, about a year ago, their eighteen-year option for the rights to produce a cinematic adaptation of Ayn Rand's unique, polarizing, and perennially successful novel (yearly sales peaked in 2009, the latest year figures are available, at 500,000 copies) were about to expire.  With no script and funding that was, to be magnanimous, inadequate, the producers scurried to begin principal photography, commencing two days before their rights were about to expire.
     The filmic results are what one would expect from such a predicament.
     The resultant film is not completely without merit, and the producers and filmmakers doubtless labored with the best of intentions.  But this desperate world needs a better adaptation of this timelier-than-ever dithyramb to reason and exaltation of man, or none.  It does not need this.

The Good:
     First: there is no denying or ignoring the source material.  It, contrary to its countless conventional critics, is unimpeachable.  At its best moments, seeing these characters and dramatic events reified onscreen can only be empowering to any fan of the novel, especially those who are also enthusiasts of cinema.  There is unquestionably a paucity of romanticism (not to mention liberty and capitalism) in today's screen, and what romanticism exists is of the superficial, modern detective story variety.  Few, if any, besides Ayn Rand have created characters like Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart, and those screenwriters of our day who are compelled to are not likely to get past the pitch meeting stage.  And it is not easy to produce a film with this core story completely devoid of merit.  However, the excellence of the novel is a blessing and a curse as it sets a higher bar, and more demanding objectives (if you'll pardon the pun), for its adapters.  Atlas Shrugged Part I is an illustrative example of that fact.  Considering that problem, though, an admirer of the novel (or anyone adrift in this culture, ravenous for romanticism in general) may well tolerate the film's shortcomings to experience intransigent, independent characters like Ellis Wyatt and scenes like the triumphant opening of the John Galt Line onscreen for fleeting moments.
     Secondly, the cinematography is, at times, rather impressive, particularly during the scenes set (and shot) in Colorado.  The agrestic, intrinsic beauty of the Rockies comes to ironic life in a hymn to the triumph of humanity (to use the politically correct, gender-neutral term of the Endarkenment).  (And, if director Paul Johansson deserves any praise, he keeps modernistic jump cutting, dutch angles, and endless, vertiginous tracking shots to a minimum: at times his film almost comes across as a 1940s film noir, in the best and worst senses of the term.)
     If there is anything else to compliment, it is this: much of the film's advance criticism is accurate, but the screenwriters (Brian Patrick O'Toole and Aglialoro) address (if somewhat inadequately) why the inhabitants of a United States set in modern times rely on railways rather than airlines for transcontinental travel.
     Otherwise, there is not much laudatory to say about Atlas Shrugged Part I.  Those who want to avoid disappointment should perhaps focus their attention at some of the fulsome praise on the film's official website.

The Bad:
     This film was poorly cast (and, consequently, often poorly acted).
     During the development phase, Hollywood stars (e.g., Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Charlize Theron, Julia Roberts, Anne Hathaway, and Russell Crowe) were noted as potential cast members.  (Jolie had delivered a letter of intent to star in the film.)
     For whatever reason(s) (budgetary, logistic, or otherwise), the cast eventually assembled are all virtual unknowns.  That is not necessarily a bad thing, and it can even be a positive development as long as the cast members are well-selected and efficacious.
     That did not happen here.
     For the role of Dagny Taggart, the poised, elegant, mature, and astute businesswoman, the producers acquired twenty-six-year-old parvenu Taylor Schilling.  Schilling is far too youthful and callow for such a role, and she does not exude the profound incisiveness of her legendary character.  She comes across more like a sorority sister at a Florida party school.
     For the role of her brother, grasping, evasive, and evading villain James Taggart, Matthew Marsden is also far too youthful.  The fifty-ish, irascible altruist is too young, too calm, just a bit too contemplative, and too much the conventional villain in this film.  Ayn Rand villains are as unique as Ayn Rand heroes, at least on the page.  This one, as evidenced by this film, is not quite.
     For the incomparable role of Hugh Akston, the genius philosopher and professor who resigns his post at the fictitious Patrick Henry University to become a short-order cook (personifying America's disdain for the intellect and the shrinking of philosophy's stature), the tall, affable, benevolent literary character is now a surly, physically unassuming curmudgeon in one of the film's most puzzling performances.
     The above list is not exhaustive but is only some of the more salient casting blunders.
     In addition to the poor casting, the urban locations (as distinct from the on-location Colorado exteriors) reinforce the film's modest budget.  Downtown Los Angeles is an obvious (and poor) substitute for New York and Philadelphia.  The distinctive Los Angeles street signs and lush foliage are glaring reminders that railroad giant Taggart Transcontinental's headquarters, wherever they are set, were filmed three thousand miles away.  In one scene set in Philadelphia (the location of Hank Rearden's Rearden Metal), the seal of the City of Los Angeles is conspicuous on the glass doors of a building.  These obvious gaffes, coupled with a somewhat amateurish production design (one observer correctly observed that the film has the look of a 1970s television movie, and the art deco, neo-noir urban street scenes remind me of a vintage, Sam Spade private eye B Movie) are a disservice to this literary work, which demands a higher level of professionalism and realism (its creator, after all, was a romantic realist who worked with the professional likes of Cecil B. DeMille, Hal Wallis, and King Vidor).  (The post production was so amateurish there were glaring, and uncommon, misspellings in the closing credits.)

The Ugly:
     If I am no judge of the acting (as distinct from the casting), I suspect it is far less than stellar in many cases (both cited above and otherwise), and I am on stronger ground regarding the writing.
     This film's screenplay is atrocious.
     In all fairness, adapting Atlas Shrugged is a herculean task.  But it should not be undertaken lightly.  Out of respect to it, one should decline such an undertaking if one is not ready, or, if the results are dire, abandon it.  Due to its birth and development amidst the aesthetic chaos of the twentieth century, cinema never rose to its full potential, and a 2011 film could never match the 1957 novel's quality, but there are still reasonable standards to apply which were not met.
     Trisecting this story into three feature films was an obvious choice; over one thousand pages of tight plotting and essentials (Ayn Rand was a ruthless champion of literary economy, the length of Atlas Shrugged notwithstanding) cannot be done justice in a single feature (as the producers apparently intended at one point, when they were wooing stars).  As this film demonstrates, it is almost equally difficult to reproduce this novel in cinematic fashion in three parts.
     O'Toole and Aglialoro condensed 310 pages of text (in the tiny font of the 1992 Signet paperback edition) into a script that, when the dust settled, clocked  in at an hour and forty-two minutes onscreen.  Those pages are fairly light on characterization (if not as light as this film), but they are teeming with events and, more important, their philosophic, economic, and political implications.
     There are reasons why I have been reticent in discussing the philosophical and (especially) economic themes of Atlas Shrugged thus far.  The novel is a nonpareil integration of literature and philosophy (including politics).  The film could not be much more disappointing in that aspect, and the abstruse motifs of ratiocinative epistemology and laissez-faire economics are largely lost in the slapdash, inadequate translation from script to screen.  There is not much intellectualism in this adaptation of this intellectual novel.  And the plot of the film is, at times, elusive even for those who are familiar with the novel.  Atlas Shrugged Part I is likely unintelligible for those who are unfamiliar with the novel.  The three-part, six-hour teleplay to a proposed miniseries, written by Ayn Rand herself and the criminally unsung Stirling Silliphant (a favorite of hers), could likely have been shot as a screenplay with minimal alterations.  Why not transmute it into three feature films?
     The writers and director depicted encroaching societal collapse (and explained the reemergence of rail travel) well enough, but the novel's crucial connection of technology and material progress to the unfettered human mind and free economy is given short shrift.  Even if they plan to expound at length in the proposed sequels, they could have increased the running time by the better part of an hour, fleshing out plot points and thematic material.  While air travel has imploded, the world of the film is otherwise little different from 2011 America: cellular towers are intact and plasma televisions are ubiquitous.  (The novel, published in 1957 and plotted a decade earlier, dramatizes a world in which radio is still the dominant medium of communication, and the writers could have done for television what they did for aviation with minimal extra effort.)  The fairly robust technology of the film, which seems to include the Internet, is rather inconsistent and confusing.
     But those shortcomings pale in comparison to the dialogue.
     Ayn Rand would almost certainly not approve of this script.  The dialogue is hackneyed, and the grammar is dumbed down to modern standards (or lack thereof).  English was Ayn Rand's third language, and the Latin alphabet was her second alphabet.  The eloquence of her prose put many native-born writers and speakers to shame, and she was a romantic realist.  Endarkenment or not, there are people who still speak eloquently, and they would include her heroes.  Henry Rearden would never say, "It is us who move the world, and it is us who will save it," and the screenwriters should not have written that.  The grammatical solecisms are far less forgivable than mundane considerations like the film's coarser language (Ayn Rand disapproved of obscenities and her characters generally eschewed them, but the writers snuck a "bullshit" and a few other crudities into the film).  (While the "bad" language was magnified, the novel's sexual content was tamed.  The innocuous, implied, and understated sex in the film is a thin depiction of the roiling, sensuous passion the author took great pains to dramatize in the book.  The PG-13 rating would be puzzling if any consistency could be reasonably expected from the Motion Picture Association of America at this point.)
     Finally, the screenwriters chose to adumbrate too much of the ending.  The latent, clandestine maneuverings of the protagonist in the book can probably be ascertained to a large extent by an astute reader, but they are skillfully and suspensefully hidden by the author.  The end of this film has an excessive spoiler that exposes too much.  For that reason alone, those who have never read the book should avoid the film, notwithstanding the fact that it is "only" part one.
     When the poor grammar and trite, prosaic dialogue are merged with insufficient plot and exposition, the result is a screenplay that is, to say the least, inadequate for any project (much less this one).
     This novel, if it is to be adapted at all, needs and deserves a painstaking, laborious, articulate, enlightening screenplay.  If the project included one, the problematic production values and abysmal casting could be tolerable, even negligible.  In the absence of one, the contemporary counterparts of David Lean and Alec Guinness themselves (assuming they exist) could not have salvaged it.  This novel has managed to not only survive, but thrive (sales ineluctably increase with every passing year) without a concomitant film.  And anyone can turn on network and cable news, read the Drudge Report (and the local newspaper), or simply walk out the front door to see a sobering and harrowing depiction of the Endarkenment.  (The fact that it will elude the notice of most of them underscores the novel's timelier-than-ever status and the imperative of a convincing, intelligible, illuminating adaptation, or none at all, and this film will not crystallize anything for them.)  Other than the opportunity to see some reproduction, any reproduction of Atlas Shrugged in this medium, I see little other good reason for this film to exist.