Page to screen: The highs and lows of 2024

Netflix turning Gabriel García Márquez’s ravishing opus One Hundred Years of Solitude into ravishing TV this December bookended a demonstrably fine year for literary adaptations. On TV at least. 2024 witnessed stories, old and new, saunter routinely from the republic of letters to the republic of moving images. But it was TV that chalked up more resounding wins in its column than cinema. Diminishing returns didn’t stop the blockbuster parade of comic book movies from pressing on with a rock-ribbed vehemence. And the studios have no intention of stopping. Big-screen iterations we could describe as a categorical success were less than a handful.

One of the pleasant surprises out of that handful was The Wild Robot. Writer-illustrator Peter Brown’s middle-grade book trilogy was always tailor-made for an animated retelling. Put in charge of the retelling was the seasoned Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon), with Dreamworks Animation producing. Lupita Nyong’o voices Roz, a robot who washes up on a remote island and ends up caring for an orphaned gosling and all the animals in the wilderness. Hand-painted landscapes brim with an arresting power pitched to a child’s sense of curiosity about the natural world. Animation gives expressive form to Roz’s journey as she goes from feeling out of place and out of use to learning the language of the wild and transcending the limits of what she has been programmed for. It enriches a tale about self-growth and found family. It deepens the lessons Roz learns about what it means to be a parent and part of a community. And it emphasises nature’s teeming beauty without tempering its harshness. It is Sanders’ faithfulness to the medium, its imaginative urges and all its woolly possibilities that gives the movie its soul.

If filming the unfilmable wasn’t a delicate challenge already, territorial fans can make it all the more so. Denis Villeneuve’s two-part Dune saga summarily proved it is not impossible to walk the fine line between fidelity and flexibility. The cinematic medium can be as inhospitable to characters’ inner landscapes as Frank Herbert’s desert planet of Arrakis. But an adept set of performers and a bit of repurposing with visual correlatives manage to turn a tome dense with introspection and exposition into a goose-pimply spectacle of epic swirl. Villeneuve broadly adheres to the narrative highlights of Herbert’s story about a future war for resources. He authenticates its fears about colonialism, faith and false messiahs, while managing to make its exploration of these big ideas more intuitive than didactic. He braces the film with the same imaginative scope that gave the book its stature as a monumental work of science fiction. In the process, he also creates images and sequences worth saving in a time capsule.

Not many might have foreseen fresh retellings of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley and James Clavell’s Shōgun to be two of the year’s best and most visually striking shows on television and streaming. It was heartening to see nonetheless. Andrew Scott makes the role of the slippery Ripley his own with an ice-cold stare and a detached physicality. Gone are the blue waters and sun-kissed colours of the Italian coastline from René Clément and Anthony Minghella’s versions. Instead, creator Steven Zaillian casts Highsmith’s chameleon in noir chic with shadows, silhouettes, stairways and a Caravaggio fetish to boot. The show is in constant dialogue with the Baroque bad boy who was on the run for murder — not unlike our con man without a conscience — in the years before his death. Death, violence and repressed sexuality haunted the tenebrist work of the 16th-century painter, same as they do in the light-and-shadow play of the eight episodes. The black-and-white photography, all crisp, gin-clear and angular, is alone enough to put you under its spell. The show, along with the recent movie Saltburn, proves just how adaptable Highsmith’s story of murder and self-invention is to contemporary anxieties, to this age of hustlers and strivers. The author herself could not have predicted its lasting resonance.

Shōgun had viewers in its thrall from the very first episode with its samurai code, power struggles and a prattling Englishman. From there, the story only grew more gripping with each passing hour as all the pawns and the players make their moves. Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks deepen the Japanese perspective of James Clavell’s 1975 historical novel, and therein lies its strength. There is plenty of spectacle here, but none quite as spellbinding as the quiet poise and determination of Anna Sawai’s Mariko-sama. The two-timing of Tadanobu Asano’s Yabushige-sama comes a close second.

The year wasn’t without damp squibs of course. Netflix’s take on Boccaccio’s The Decameronwas a little rough around the edges, summoning the text’s irreverent spirit in the face of an existential crisis but capturing few laughs and none of the bite of its medieval repartee. For the millions of dollars the streaming giant spent on bringing Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy to life on screen, 3 Body Problem looked like wet concrete, like a twice-translated work from a corporate committee, denuded of a clear authorial voice. With HBO’s The Sympathizer, Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar fared much better because they don’t submerge their own voices entirely in service of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s daring vision. The show thrives when becoming something all its own. Never does it come across as a dehydrated-and-salvaged version of the novel, afraid to stray too far from the guide-ropes of the story. As it reframes the Vietnam War and its aftermath through the eyes of a Viet Cong double agent, it treats us to a story about history and memory, identity and cognitive dissonance, acculturation and displacement. If the visuals of 3 Body Problem are flat and drab, the visuals of The Sympathizer pops and bops. And it makes all the difference.

Rivals was maybe less heralded but no less engaging. Start with a Dame Jilly Cooper novel about the cut-throat world of broadcasting, populated by posh types with posh names (like Rupert Campell-Blank) punning and quoting Yeats, al fresco romping and playing tennis in the nude. Put together a terrific ensemble of performers (led by David Tennant, Alex Hassell and Aidan Turner) so tuned to the author’s cadences the lines land with a sharper edge. And you have got yourself a sordid jamboree that made for appointment bingeing. Ambition, betrayal, greed, revenge and good old-fashioned hedonism were the earmarks of Rivals, the second entry in Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles series. 2024’s horniest show, from Disney+ no less, actively engages with its source material, confronting the casual abuse of authority, sexism, racism, homophobia, and all the hypocrisies of a sexed-up aristocracy during the Thatcher era. The key is the show still has fun while doing it.

One Hundred Years of Solitude was a textbook example of an unfilmable book. There was the challenge of its generations-spanning story to contend with. Then its vast ensemble of characters, its endless symbolisms and asides, its exquisite blend of myth, history, memory, language, culture and nature — with a touch of magic. From the eight of 16 episodes that have dropped on Netflix so far, it looks like we may have a stridently dauntless work up to the challenge. It has been encouraging to see all the components of Márquez’s intricate literary latticework work so beautifully in tandem. Instead of hacking through the thickets of a novel for an abridged movie, a show of 16 episodes no doubt offers more space to rupture the bounds of easy resolution while still paying deference to the original. But this isn’t a show that overly relies on the borrowed prestige of its source material to inflate its own. Although it does help. The deeply considered page-to-screen translation conjures a Macondo worthy of worship. A flood of rich textures soaks through images and sounds echoing around the chronicle of the mythical town, from its creation through evolutions and revolutions to its eventual demise. If you have read the book, you can practically smell and taste the air of Macondo when you watch the show. And when the first half ends, you feel the ache of wishing you were still living in it, so much so you feel like going back and reading the book all over again. There is no better marker of a successful adaptation than that.

*Note: Film adaptations of William S Burroughs’ Queer and Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys are yet to release in India at the time of writing this article.

Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.