When I saw Ragtime on the syllabus, it brought back vague memories of the movie version we watched in freshman year. What I remembered: a burning library building (whoops, there goes the dramatic ending -- also, I may have made up a fire) and a story about poor old James Cagney and the director's desperation to cast him that my dad has told literally every time I've brought up the movie. During the novel I recognized a few more elements -- a ball, Stanford White being shot, finding the baby in the garden -- but the beginning of the novel was a little disorienting.
However, I found that I liked the novel much better than the film. Obviously I probably would have remembered a little more of the movie if I'd actually liked it (the memory loss may have something to do with the entire freshman year being a blur and watching the movie in little 45 minute chunks). On the other hand the novel immediately hooked me and I can't see completely forgetting it anytime soon. The novel just seems way more interesting and adventurous than the movie, which was nothing extraordinary, due both to the expanded plot and the writing style.
One of the things about history is that it's really hard to get all the sides of something, especially as you get bigger and bigger in scope. People have made all sorts of attempts at summing up various time periods -- decades seem to be particularly popular. In Race Class Gender Mr. Leff made a point at the beginning of almost every unit to say that the stereotypes we have of periods -- flappers in the 20s, Mad Men-esque in the 50s, etc -- aren't necessarily very accurate. To me Ragtime seemed like a more interesting attempt to portray an era -- including little stories from all sorts of different classes -- the little family, the black man, the rich men, the immigrants, etc. Obviously you can never really totally represent something that big but I liked how Doctorow tried to tie everything together.
After reading the novel I was also a little disappointed that the film was nothing special -- I felt like they could have done something much cooler. We talked in class about how Doctorow has all these sweeping paragraphs that feel like movie montages and I really enjoyed his treatment of the characters and his use of irony -- I don't remember any of these from the movie, but loved them in the book.
As a reader of the novel, I too was disappointed by the film (although parts of it--what was supposed to be Atlantic City--were filmed very close to my home when I was a young boy in a sailor suit sitting on my front porch, and I remember all the excitement with the big Hollywood production setting up in the beach town one over from me, Spring Lake). It was cool to see the Essex House hotel in my old hood refashioned in this historical context, but otherwise, the film really wasn't that interested in the historical/fictional grey areas. It mostly eschewed the history (aside from the usual cinematic need for costumes and cars and stuff to make it look old) in favor of the dramatic fictional stories (Coalhouse, the Family, Tateh). There's no Morgan or Ford, no Nesbit or Goldman. That collage/panorama effect is lost.
ReplyDeleteNow, maybe this is simply smart filmmaking: for a conventional Hollywood screenplay, the Coalhouse story is the good stuff. But film could totally do interesting stuff to blur history and fiction (like what Philip Kaufman does in films like _The Unbearable Lightness of Being_ or _Hemingway and Gelhorn_, mixing archival footage with images of the actors--an effect quite similar to what Doctorow achieves in writing. It just simply wasn't what Milos Forman was interested in doing.