THE MUSIC OF CHANCE
With Mandy Patinkin, James Spader, M. Emmet Walsh, Charles Durning, Joel Grey, Samantha Mathis, and Christopher Penn.
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If Auster were taken literally, the best medium for adapting his fiction would be the Disney cartoon feature. But in fact the differences between seeing Beauty and the Beast and hearing the story read aloud are profound–as profound as the differences between reading Auster’s beautifully crystalline prose and seeing Philip Haas’s intelligent but fairly literal screen adaptation of The Music of Chance.
In terms of plot, Haas’s The Music of Chance is every bit as sketchy as Auster’s novel–even more so, given the deleted material (such as the opening chapter) and a few distracting additions (such as the cutesy, compromised tacked-on ending). But in terms of narrative method, the movie eliminates much of the space for the audience that the novel opens up to the reader, and without employing any film style that might compensate for the reduction. As a result, what makes the novel compulsively readable makes the movie relatively dull; the enforced passivity of conventional moviegoing simply can’t compare with the enforced mental activity of reading a novel. And the meditation on freedom that lies at the heart of the parablelike story in novel and film alike ultimately only cheats on its initial implied promise to tell us something concrete about the contemporary world.
Nashe needs a respite from the protracted existential drift triggered by his inheritance (recounted in the novel’s first 20 pages but reduced to a few belated lines of dialogue in the movie) and needs to replenish the money he has left after his year of cross-country driving. So he agrees to stake Pozzi in a poker game with the two millionaires–middle-aged single men who won their riches in a lottery and now share a mansion on an estate in rural Pennsylvania–and split the winnings.
