Cinema
Lord of the Flies
(`15', Cannon Shaftesbury Avenue)
Keeping it simple
Hilary Mantel
Adimwit publisher once rejected Wil- liam Golding's masterpiece, saying, 'It does not seem to us that you have been wholly successful in working out an admit- tedly promising idea.' You wouldn't look so foolish if you made the same comment about Harry Hook's film version. Adults may feel that their memories of the book supply a metaphorical dimension, but what actually reaches the screen is an adventure story, well-made and exciting. Boys of 12 would love it; unfortunately, it has a '15' certificate.
In this version of the story, the boys marooned on a desert island after an air-crash are not Golding's tight-lipped and class-ridden British schoolboys, but a bunch of kids from an American military academy. Between their cries of 'Gross!' and 'Eat shit!' the story's finer points are lost, and some may feel that the boys have not much of a veneer of civilisation for harsh events to chip away; certainly their imaginations seem informed more by horror films than by ghost stories or the 'I found a cost-effective, tax-efficient way of securing my position and saving the company — I sotd my soul to the devil.' dimly comprehended precepts of religion and social morality.
Yet Hook's updating, no doubt a shrewd commercial decision, does not prevent him from making his points as neatly as he did in his earlier film The Kitchen Toto: as in that film, he shows great dramatic flair. In the island's emerging society, the battle lines are swiftly and simply drawn. In Golding's book there was no adult on the island, but here the pilot comes ashore, wounded and delirious, and in time crawls off to die in a cave. It is he who, in the children's imagination, becomes a mons- ter, a grave and ill-defined external threat; it is because of this threat that the savage and authoritarian Jack gains the upper hand over the compassionate Ralph and the rational democrat Piggy. Hook has embodied the threat, driven the point home; he is probably right if he thinks that present-day audiences wouldn't know an allegory if it came up and bit them. The child actors are convincing, the action bustles along, and the photography has a lustrous splendour. Grown-up knowing- ness must provide the sophistication.
Re-reading William Trevor's Fools of Fortune, just reissued in Penguin, I found myself wondering two things: how the cinema would compete with the vivid images that Trevor transplants into the reader's head, and how it would capture the spirit of a story where the present is shaped at every point by the tragic past, and is touched also by foreknowledge and foreboding. The story concerns the inter- linked (indeed, intermarried) fortunes of two families, the Woodcombes of Dorset and the Quintons of Co. Cork, and begins with events in Ireland during the early 1920s. Willie Quinton shares the family house, Kilneagh, with his parents and two small sisters. The family are Protestants, but heirs to a humanitarian tradition, and now more Irish than English; in consequ- ence of this, the Black and Tans burn Kilneagh to the ground. Willie and .his mother survive — his mother becomes an alcoholic and commits suicide, and Willie's life is consumed by the need for revenge.
If the subject matter is sour, the opening, half-hour is over-sweet, with the family and their domestics oozing goodwill at each other and talking about Irish politics in short bursts of obviousness, as if they were in a comic strip. But the rest of the film is a somewhat tearful pleasure. Direc- tor Tim Pat O'Connor seems wholly in sympathy with his subject, and there are good performances from Julie Christie as Mrs Quinton and from the very pretty Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as the Eng- lish cousin who bears Willie's child. This child goes mad, without too much explana- tion — but the lack of it hardly seems the film-maker's fault. A television serialisa- tion might in some ways have served the story better; in four or five hours of screen time you might hope to unravel its delicate threads.
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