I really wanted to like Fahrenheit 451, as it was based on a novel by one of my favorite writers, Ray Bradbury, and it was directed by one my favorite filmmakers, Francois Traffaut. I had originally seen the film divided over a three-day period in my high school English class. I remembered not liking it, but thought I might change my mind later. Unfortunately, my original opinion was correct- it was on Traffaut's weakest film, an opinion shared by the director himself. Many critics have stated that it is exceedingly difficult to translate Bradbury's work to the screen, primarily because of the writer's poetic, metaphor laden prose. Although I have not read Fahrenheit 451, I have read many of Bradbury's short stories, including one of the best I have encountered, "Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed", and I can attest that this observation is accurate. So much of the action takes place in character's own heads, or in Bradbury's omniscient observations that to merely film the action is not only incomplete, it misses the point, which is possibly why the movie is so disappointing. Although commonly thought of as being about a society that has banned reading, most of the movie is a sadly typical American Beauty-type account of a man who sleeps through life and slowly begins to realize that he's not really living. The problem is that the man always seems to be sleeping. His name is Montag, and he's played in a spectacularly bland performance by Oscar Werner. I am not alone in finding his performance to be somnambulant, Traffaut ended a close friendship with the actor over what he considered to be his failure to emote.
Montag is a fireman, which means in this future that he starts fires as opposed to putting them out. What he burns is books- there are some people who still hoard the forbidden texts. Why are they banned? "They make people sad", says the fire chief (Cyril Cusack). Instead, the newspapers are written in comic book format (without voice balloons) and everyone spends most of the day watching an insipid TV show called The Family. Montag doesn't question any of this until he meets Clarisse (Julie Christie) on a bus ride, who herself questions the effectiveness of society's mores. Montag realizes that his wife (oddly enough, also Julie Christie) is an idiot, and his curiosity is piqued by the books he burns- what do they talk about, anyway? Werner's flawed performance makes Montag's journey very difficult to care about, but he is not helped by some poor directorial choices from Truffaut. For one thing, I never really got the idea that I was in the future- everything in this movie looks so 1960's that it's a times laughable. The script is somewhat predictable and formless, with many unnecessary scenes. This might be due to the fact that Truffaut spoke no English and directed the film through an interpreter (as well as using a translated screenplay) but it greatly hurts the movie nonethess. Finally, the movie has a muddled intellectual argument- is the point supposed to be that books are good and TV is bad? That a free market of ideas- which print is the best artistic medium for- is essential, even if it makes you feel bad? I didn't find these ideas particularly compelling.
Fahrenheit 451 (1966)