Fahrenheit 451 (TV)
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is one of the books I bought several years ago, but have never gotten to reading. Now that I have seen two different takes on the material not really make this story work as movies, I’m probably going to finally read it for myself, if only to see why filmmakers (and GOOD filmmakers, no less) can’t seem to bring it to the screen in a compelling way. And, given our present issues as a society with propaganda and “fake news” and distrust in the printed word, you would think a filmmaker like Ramin Bahrani (“Goodbye Solo”) could make a searing science-fiction film out of this iconic material. Truth being stranger than fiction, however, Bahrani’s film just can’t land its punches, and honestly, it’s baffling to watch.
Like Francois Truffaut’s 1966 film of Bradbury’s novel, Bahrani’s film focuses on Guy Montag (Michael B. Jordan), a firefighter in a dystopian society where, instead of putting out fires, firefighters start fires. Specifically, they are tasked with setting fire to books, movies, music, everything that might pollute the mind away from what the state wants citizen’s believing. Stationed in a futuristic Cleveland, Montag and his superior, Captain Beatty (Michael Shannon) train new cadets to do the work of extinguishing the world of all books, all for the world to see on the internet, now known as “The Nines”; they’re mantra is, “If you see something, say something.” In doing their work, Beatty and Montag sometimes get intel on “Eels” (book-reading outcasts) from Clarisse (Sofia Boutella), an Eel informant for them. During one trip, they find a house filled with books, whose owner self-immolates with the collection, but not before saying a word, “Omniss,” that will pose a the state’s ability to control Eel behavior. Montag does something unexpected at this raid, though, and takes a book, which he starts to read. It opens his mind to what they are doing, and what society may be losing through his work.
I’m seriously at a loss as to how neither Bahrani nor Truffaut were really able to bring this story to life as a movie. With Truffaut, you can at least say that, perhaps, the technology was not quite available to him to really make Bradbury’s world feel real on-screen, but Bahrani has access to that technology, and while the film looks more interesting than Truffaut’s, the ultimate problem lies in how both tell the story. Montag in both films is relatively passive as a main character, with very little on the surface emotionally; that’s the type of thing that works great on the page, but is hard to translate to film with changing your approach to the character. (It doesn’t help, in Bahrani’s film, that Montag does not have a wife, which added a dimension to the character’s story in the Truffaut film. We see flashbacks on Montag seeing his father taken into custody for being an Eel, but it just doesn’t succeed in adding dimension to the character the same way him being married does.) Jordan is a great choice for this role, but he’s not given anything to play, and it’s probably one of my biggest disappointments in film this year to see him not follow-up his brilliant work in “Black Panther” with something equally exciting here. Shannon is more successful as Beatty, but that’s because Michael Shannon is allowed to show more emotion, to go bigger, and that’s basically where Shannon has always been pretty great, as an actor. There are some interesting ideas from the here and now brought in- like live feeds of raids and social media reaction- that feel as though they should be at home in this story, but distract from the bare bones narrative Bradbury set forth. There’s still a lot of movies this year, but this may prove to be the most disappointing one of 2018, and I’ll probably feel worse about it after reading the book.
