Ian McEwan adaptations on DVD

This week sees the DVD release of ’The Cement Garden‘, the unsettling 1993 film of Ian McEwan‘s novel. Dave Calhoun looks back at the author‘s works that have been turned into movies, while Books editor John O‘Connell considers those still awaiting the cinematic treatment

McEwan on screen

‘The Cement Garden’ (1993), dir Andrew Birkin
Perhaps the best of the adaptations of Ian McEwan’s books, Andrew Birkin’s version of the author’s first novel about a young family left without mother or father in a strange suburban London home full of teenage sexual longing under the heat of a summer sun is both faithful to the book and imbued with a filmic language of its own. Andrew Robertson and Charlotte Gainsbourg are excellent as Jack and Julie, two siblings whose roles in the family and sexual desires are shifted to the point of incest by their parents’ deaths. The setting – a lone house set in a strange concrete wasteland – is remarkably as McEwan describes it.

‘The Comfort of Strangers’ (1990), dir Paul Schrader
The holiday from hell… Harold Pinter wrote the script for this Venice-set, baroque thriller of sexual envy as Colin (Rupert Everett) and Mary (Natasha Richardson) encounter a seductive pair of wealthy Canadian residents, Robert (Christopher Walken) and Caroline (Helen Mirren), while on a second honeymoon in the Italian city. ‘Want? I’ll show you what we want!’ says a quietly furious Robert in a late close-up from Schrader that breaks through Robert’s dapper, white-suited exterior. Pinter’s heightened dialogue adds to a sense of erotic dread that underpins the whole film.

‘The Innocent’ (1993), dir John Schlesinger
The second McEwan film in a year after ‘The Cement Garden’ to feature a body that needs disposing and that symbolises wider troubles… What begins as a mildly diverting period tale of a British electrical expert Leonard Markham (Campbell Scott) seconded to the US army and a gruff boss Bob Glass (Anthony Hopkins) in 1955 Berlin turns into a claustrophobic story of love and espionage when Leonard falls for a German woman, Maria (Isabella Rossellini). The sense of the melting-pot of postwar Berlin (as inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall, which features in the film) is intriguing but its political and emotional investigations are not as potent as they should be. McEwan adapted the screenplay himself.

‘Enduring Love’ (2004), dir Roger Michell
Roger Michell plays his strongest card in the first ten minutes of this film with his arresting portrayal of the opening of McEwan’s 1997 book: science lecturer Daniel Craig finds himself running to help when a red hot-air balloon comes loose in a field, dragging a man upwards with it… From there, Michell and writer Joe Penhall prefer to indulge the thriller/ Rhys Ifans’s stalker element of the story rather than fully indulge in the ideas of intellectual and emotional disappointment that characterise the novel. It’s nevertheless a beguiling work and a superior thriller.

‘Atonement’ (2007), dir Joe Wright
In the biggest commercial success of all the McEwan adaptations, Joe Wright turned a book with an epic sweep about two nascent lovers, Robbie and Cecilia, who are separated by a young girl’s lie and the events of World War II, into a film of similarly grandiose ambition. Whether or not Wright and writer Christopher Hampton managed to capture fully the role of the untrustworthy narrator that’s central to the book is a moot point.
Dave Calhoun

McEwan: the unfilmed books

‘The Child in Time’ (1987)
McEwan’s first full-length novel is a book of ideas (the impact of quantum physics on time and our perception of loss) but lacks the thriller plot that galvanises later work like ‘Enduring Love’ and makes them succeed as films. That said, you can see how a director like Nicolas Roeg would handle the agonising opening scene in which children’s author Stephen loses his daughter in a supermarket.

‘Amsterdam’ (1998)
McEwan’s weakest novel starts with the funeral of ‘gorgeous wit’ Molly Lane, then unpicks the relationship between three of her ex-lovers to show how two of them become mortal enemies. Unconvincing on the page, it’s hard to see how an adaptation would improve matters. You’d end up with something along the lines of Louis Malle’s terrible version of Josephine Hart’s awful novel ‘Damage’, and nobody wants that.

‘Saturday’ (2005)
This novel, which follows a day in the life of a neurosurgeon, would make a great film and is almost certainly in development. Its famous set-pieces – Perowne’s car accident; naked, pregnant Daisy reciting a poem in a bid to distract Baxter from raping her – seem almost to have been constructed with adaptation in mind.

‘On Chesil Beach’ (2007)
You could adapt this tale of a newly married couple honeymooning on the Dorset coast – someone like Richard Eyre would do it with enormous tact. But this is the one McEwan novel that, for me, works so well as a piece of writing that no adaptation could be anything but a corruption. How do you film a sentence like this – ‘It brought him to a point of unfamiliar ecstasy, cold and sharp just below the ribs, the way her tongue gently enveloped his as he pushed against it’ – and not end up with a generic sex scene?
John O’Connell

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