A Fumbled "Fahrenheit 451"

Ramin Bahrani is a great filmmaker, best known for a certain type of small scale, socially conscious film. "Fahrenheit 451" is his first real foray outside that milieu, and it's a pretty clear failure. It is, however, an interesting failure. Ray Bradbury's work has been notoriously difficult to translate to the screen, often because the pleasures of his writing lie more in the prose than in the plot. The Francois Truffaut 1966 film version of "Fahrenheit 451," though relatively faithful, had some glaring issues hampering its effectiveness. Half a century later, the story is more relevant than ever, and a new, updated film version seemed like a very good idea on paper.

How Bahrani and co-writer Amir Naderi decided to update the story of the Firemen who burn books, however, leaves a lot to be desired. Some of their creative decisions are fine - Michael B. Jordan makes a decent Guy Montag, and Michael Shannon is all you could ask for as his self-hating superior, Captain Beatty. The addition of social media and live-streaming as new distractions in their dystopia make a certain amount of sense. However, the free-thinking innocent Clarisse becoming a police informant and member of an underground movement of knowledge-saving "Eels" is more concerning. She's also Montag's explicit love interest, and played by Sofia Boutella. And then there's the wholesale invention of a sci-fi MacGuffin that forces a showdown between the Firemen and the Eels over the fate of human knowledge.

The whole thing reeks of the story being dumbed down and sexed up to appeal to the baser tastes of a mainstream audience, one of the very things that the book warned against. Perhaps this isn't such a surprise considering this version is a television movie. However, it's HBO footing the bill, with a notable filmmaker in full creative control. Usually that means we get better results than this. With loose adaptations of difficult material, I'm all for ignoring the title and trying to take a piece of media on its own terms, and treating it like something original. However, the movie is a messy, half-baked disappointment even by that measure. There are roughly similar "Black Mirror" and "Electric Dreams" episodes that outdo the new "Fahrenheit" by an embarrassingly wide margin.

The primary issue is with the script, full of strange dead ends and unfinished thoughts. Captain Beatty transcribes and puzzles over quotes from forbidden books in private, a transgression that never really seems to have anything to do with his actions or illuminates anything about his thoughts. Clarisse has terribly unclear motives throughout, often seeming to act against her own interests. Montag is given a new hidden past to have flashbacks to, but they lead to no real resolution. The stolen books he reads give him reason to ask new questions and value knowledge, but he remains oddly opaque and shallow throughout. Michael B. Jordan's performance is fine, but I feel like I missed his character's transformation.

I have to wonder why the character of Montag's wife was removed from the film, because her absence leaves a gaping hole both narratively and thematically. Now there's no vapid, illiterate dullard to compare Clarice against or to show the terrible consequences of a world where mindless distractions have totally replaced critical thought. An actress was announced for the part months ago, so I imagine that at some point Bahrani decided she wasn't working and cut her from the film. Hower, he didn't replace her material with anything equally compelling, instead streamlining the rest of the story into a generic action/adventure narrative.

There are flashes of ambition here and there. The characters spend quite a bit of time appreciating the written word, especially Dostoevsky "Notes From the Underground," which Montag reads excerpts from. Shannon's performance is very memorable, though the character is ultimately a disappointment. I even found the Montag and Clarisse romance promising, but the film doesn't really commit to that storyline either. Montag and Beatty's relationship is the one that is treated as the most important one at the climax, but it's never developed enough to give us a sense of real stakes.

Frankly, there was a significant amount of work that had to be done before this version of the film should have been attempted. As is, this is a sad waste of good material and a wonderful opportunity.
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