{"id":11796,"date":"2011-02-24T12:40:00","date_gmt":"2011-02-24T17:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11796"},"modified":"2011-03-04T13:15:53","modified_gmt":"2011-03-04T18:15:53","slug":"on-%e2%80%98barney%e2%80%99s-version%e2%80%99-the-elasticity-of-cinema","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/02\/24\/on-%e2%80%98barney%e2%80%99s-version%e2%80%99-the-elasticity-of-cinema\/","title":{"rendered":"On \u2018Barney\u2019s Version\u2019: The Elasticity of Cinema"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><script type=\"text\/javascript\"><!--\nvar firsttext='<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11783\">A Confession<\/a><br \/>David Bezmozgis | February 23, 2011'\nvar secondtext='<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11789\">The Canadian Jewish Experience<\/a><br \/>Richard J. Lewis | February 23, 2011'\nvar thirdtext='<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11796\">The Elasticity of Cinema<\/a><br \/>David Bezmozgis | February 24, 2011'\nvar fourthtext='<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11797\">Paul Giamatti Is Barney Panofsky<\/a><br \/>Richard J. Lewis | February 24, 2011'\nvar fifthtext='<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11799\">The Great Taboo<\/a><br \/>David Bezmozgis | February 25, 2011'\nvar sixthtext='<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11801\">Barney's Voice<\/a><br \/>Richard J. Lewis | February 25, 2011'\nfunction writetext(what){\ndocument.getElementById('textarea').innerHTML=''+what+'';\n}\n\/\/-->\n<\/script><\/p>\n<table width=500 border=0px cellpadding=5px cellspacing=0px>\n<tr>\n<td valign=middle width=175><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11783\" ><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/box1roll.jpg\" onmouseover=\"writetext(firsttext)\"><\/a>  <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11789\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/box2roll.jpg\" onmouseover=\"writetext(secondtext)\"><\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11796\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/box3roll.jpg\" onmouseover=\"writetext(thirdtext)\"><\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11797\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/box4roll.jpg\" onmouseover=\"writetext(fourthtext)\"><\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11799\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/box5roll.jpg\" onmouseover=\"writetext(fifthtext)\"><\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11801\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/box6roll.jpg\" onmouseover=\"writetext(sixthtext)\"><\/a>\n<\/td>\n<td>\n<div id=\"textarea\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11783\">A Confession<\/a> <br \/> David Bezmozgis | February 23, 2011<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<div id=\"attachment_12002\" style=\"width: 290px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-12002\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12002\" title=\"Barney's Version\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/minniedriver_BLOG.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"280\" height=\"248\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-12002\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Paul Giamatti and Minnie Driver. <\/p><\/div>\n<p>Richard,<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m not a Talmudist, but in my recollection of the Talmud\u2014which I was exposed to only as an adolescent in a Toronto Hebrew school\u2014there were many rabbis engaging in debates, often across generations. Sometimes they agreed, sometimes they disagreed, and sometimes they agreed to disagree\u2014the latter was my favorite, as it was personified by my Hebrew teacher holding both hands palms up and speaking the philosophical word <em>Teiku<\/em>. (I think the literal translation is <em>tie<\/em>. No overtime. No shootout.) Maybe some of the debates ended with \u201cWhy not?\u201d but I don\u2019t remember those. Although I feel like I know a half dozen Jewish jokes that end that way.<\/p>\n<p>Certainly from an industrial, practical perspective, I get what you mean about the film business needing good stories to feed through the story mill. Good stories are hard to find. It\u2019s true, too, that the film industry has traditionally turned to books and movies\u2014now comic books\u2014for material. Witness the two writing categories in the Academy Awards: Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay. You\u2019ll get no argument from me about the practice being fundamental to the medium, but that still doesn\u2019t quite explain why it is so. And I\u2019ll grant you also that people love to tell and hear the same stories. Children particularly love to hear the same stories repeated. I couldn\u2019t count the number of times I\u2019ve read <em>If You Give a Mouse a Cookie &#8230;<\/em> to my two-year-old daughter. But there\u2019s still something different about the impulse to transmute a story from one form to another. Besides, if we just liked repetition, we would reread the same book over and over again. (Other than the Bible, does any other book get that kind of treatment? And besides, people don\u2019t read the Bible the way they read <em>The Great Gatsby<\/em>.) And though there\u2019s more of a tendency now to adapt movies into stage productions, that process seems to me to be artificial. I don\u2019t think anyone\u2014other than an opportunistic theater producer\u2014comes out of a movie and says, That would make an awesome play! Yet people who comes out of plays, and close the covers of books, often say, That would make a great movie! My take\u2014merely on the conceptual level: Movies are an elastic form. Depending on ingenuity and budget, they can stretch to match the proportions of a person\u2019s imagination. For example, space travel in a play or an opera will always feel simulated, but that isn\u2019t true of movies.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->But having said that, just because the form can seemingly accommodate magnitudes doesn\u2019t mean it can accommodate them successfully. The belief is that some books lend themselves better than others to the screen. But what sorts of books work best? <em>The Great Gatsby<\/em>, a relatively short book, with relatively few characters and a relatively linear plot, has been attempted a few times\u2014and is about to be attempted again. But the general opinion (if I may) is that none of the movies have matched the power of the novel. Huge epics, among them<em>War and Peace<\/em> and <em>Doctor Zhivago<\/em>, have also been made\u2014maybe more successfully?<\/p>\n<p>When I think about <em>Barney\u2019s Version<\/em>, I can see on the one hand how it\u2019s such an appealing story for the screen, but on the other hand, it also seems loaded with obstacles. The appeal, I\u2019d say, lies in the characters. Richler was celebrated for his witty, full-blooded characters, especially the men\u2014although, in <em>Barney\u2019s Version<\/em>, he has some wonderful supporting female characters. (I\u2019m thinking particularly of the Second Mrs. Panofsky whom, I thought, Minnie Driver captured spectacularly.) But then there are all those logistical obstacles. The story tracks Barney over the course of some five decades. It flashes and back and forth between Paris in the 1950s and contemporary Montreal, with stops in London and Hollywood along the way. There are all those meta-footnotes. There\u2019s all that Montreal Canadiens mania! I wonder, when you looked at the novel, what was it that seized you? What did you envision as the core of the film you wanted to make?<\/p>\n<p>Yrs,<\/p>\n<p>db<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Confession David Bezmozgis | February 23, 2011 Richard, I\u2019m not a Talmudist, but in my recollection of the Talmud\u2014which I was exposed to only as an adolescent in a Toronto Hebrew school\u2014there were many rabbis engaging in debates, often across generations. Sometimes they agreed, sometimes they disagreed, and sometimes they agreed to disagree\u2014the latter [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":124,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1900],"tags":[1084,1905,1906,1901,1904,1903,202,1902],"class_list":["post-11796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-correspondence","tag-adaptation","tag-barneys-version","tag-book","tag-david-bezmozgis","tag-e-mail","tag-epistolary-exchange","tag-movie","tag-richard-j-lewis"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>On \u2018Barney\u2019s Version\u2019: The Elasticity of Cinema by David Bezmozgis<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"February 24, 2011 \u2013 A Confession David Bezmozgis | February 23, 2011 Richard, I\u2019m not a Talmudist, but in my recollection of the Talmud\u2014which I was exposed to only as an\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/02\/24\/on-\u2018barney\u2019s-version\u2019-the-elasticity-of-cinema\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"On \u2018Barney\u2019s Version\u2019: The Elasticity of Cinema by David Bezmozgis\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"February 24, 2011 \u2013 A Confession David Bezmozgis | February 23, 2011 Richard, I\u2019m not a Talmudist, but in my recollection of the Talmud\u2014which I was exposed to only as an\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/02\/24\/on-\u2018barney\u2019s-version\u2019-the-elasticity-of-cinema\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2011-02-24T17:40:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2011-03-04T18:15:53+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/box1roll.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"David Bezmozgis\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"David Bezmozgis\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/02\/24\/on-%e2%80%98barney%e2%80%99s-version%e2%80%99-the-elasticity-of-cinema\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/02\/24\/on-%e2%80%98barney%e2%80%99s-version%e2%80%99-the-elasticity-of-cinema\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"David Bezmozgis\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/423d8a8649815cabe525122853c224de\"},\"headline\":\"On \u2018Barney\u2019s Version\u2019: The Elasticity of Cinema\",\"datePublished\":\"2011-02-24T17:40:00+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2011-03-04T18:15:53+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/02\/24\/on-%e2%80%98barney%e2%80%99s-version%e2%80%99-the-elasticity-of-cinema\/\"},\"wordCount\":732,\"commentCount\":2,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/02\/24\/on-%e2%80%98barney%e2%80%99s-version%e2%80%99-the-elasticity-of-cinema\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/box1roll.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"adaptation\",\"Barney's Version\",\"book\",\"David Bezmozgis\",\"e-mail\",\"epistolary exchange\",\"movie\",\"Richard J. 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