Why the Excitement?: Hollywood's Adaptation of Joe R. Lansdale's The Thicket

My ears perk up when I hear that a novel I enjoyed will be adapted to the big screen. Not sure why. Fool me once, your fault. Fool me a hundred times, my fault. Maybe I get excited because the few films which do capture a book's character are so good? Regardless, I went into Elliot Lester's adaptation of Joe Lansdale's The Thicket with hope. With the right actors and script, they could do justice to Lansdale's twisting, irreverent Western. Alas, the only justice is this blog post.

At cloud level, the Hollywood adaptation follows the formula and journey of Lansdale's The Thicket. A gang kidnaps a sister, triggering the brother to hunt them down. On their trail he forms an unlikley posse: a dwarf, black man, and prostitute. Things get hairier and hairier, leading to a showdown at the titular thicket. At the ground level, however, the film departs from Lansdale's story at a couple key points, points critical to the film's success.

Firstly, the film's producers chose to portay the gang and their run to the thicket. Lansdale left this entirely off-stage, allowing the mystery of what happened to the sister to grow and the aura of the gang to grow in menace. The posse are always one step behind, witness to the destruction the gang leave in their wake, but not the act itself. Will the sister even be alive when the posse catch up? That is the main question the reader asks themselves. Not so in the film. Everything is visible.  The mystery is gone, and the mood becomes more of a typical Western gang doing gang stuff.

But the bigger impact of this change, beyond suspense and mood, is that of proportion. Choosing to portray the villains' side of things leaves 30-40% less film to develop the heroes' stories. To be clear, almost every film adaption cuts portions of the novel on which they're based. It's natural.  Two, three hundred pages have trouble being squeezed into a tv series, let alone a two-hour film. But the producers of The Thicket chose to not only cut portions of the heroes' stories, they also chose to cut 30-40% more to make room for the villains.

Another result of the choice to include the villains is the corner that producers put themselves in: quality or quantity? Rather than having the time to develop individual scenes, they now have to speed through scenes to get their villain content on-screen. They chose quantity. The result is a fast-paced film, but at the expense of viewer investment. Just as you are getting into a scene, just as the dialogue is starting to get spicy, the scene is cut, and on to the next. The film carousels, one quick scene after another. The actors are never allowed to truly dig into a moment or the viewer to feel them. Unlike Lansdale's novel, the reader struggles to build a relationship with the characters. They become more like talking heads with scenery whirling past.

The second major change adapting the novel to film is the lack of focus on character dialogue. Lansdale's idiosyncratic palaver is particular. It gives his story soul. Along with unpredictable plotting, it's the reason to read a Lansdale novel. The film's dialogue, however, is mostly lackluster—only occasionally inspiring. This is partially due to the fact scenes never get a chance to percolate, but mostly due to the writers not re-using Lansdale's material. Even if time is precious, why not take some of Lansdale's great one-liners word for word? Why reinvent the wheel? You paid him the rights for the film, why not cherrypick the best bits?

There are other changes. Producers made the gang leader Bill a woman (nicely played by Juliette Lewis). The film modifies the novel's ending slightly, making it a bit more bittersweet. And where the book's tale was told across several seasons, the film is set in one winter. None of these changes have a major impact on the adaptation. If the focus had been the heroes' quest and good dialogue, I would have zero issue with these changes. As it stands, you have to ask: why?

In the end, The Thicket is just one more poor Hollywood adaptation. More actor talent, wasted. Millions, down the tube. To be clear, Lansdale's novel is not Pulitzer material. But it is an engaging read, one of those stories with heart you don't want to put down. By comparison, The Thicket film adaptation is just normal, average, fair. Nothing to write home about, nothing to remember. Which is a shame. A good adaptation was entirely possible. Regardless male or female, reduce the villain scenes to bare minimum so that the heroes and their plight have time to develop a relationship with the viewer. Leave a pleasant sting in the audience's ear by adding more of Lansdale's dialogue. And when it comes to scenes, go for quality over quantity. As Tarantino has proven, a chase can be made exciting and engaging without depicting every step.

And yet my ears will stil perk up, hearing of the next Hollywood adaptation of a novel I like. Pavlov's dog I am...