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I saw Atlas Shrugged Part I in Phoenix on Friday night. The crowd was quite large, and the theater even had to add an extra showing that night to accommodate the overflow. Many in the audience were dressed in Ayn Rand or Atlas-themed T-shirts, and throughout the movie, they were virtually silent, trying to absorb every word and every scene.
But I did not have high expectations. So many early reviews had given it something like a 6 or 7 out of 10 that I was prepared for it to be bad, and it wasn’t quite bad—but it wasn’t quite good, either. The reason wasn’t the acting—I thought just about all the actors did fine jobs, particularly Taylor Schilling, who in my opinion, was almost exactly Dagny Taggart. Matthew Marsden was the only disappointment to me, playing James Taggart not as the whiny emotionalistic dishrag that he is in the book, but as a scheming villain, which he only very gradually becomes in the book. (One blogger was surprised at the choice of such a handsome actor, but Rand does specify in the book that James is good looking.) The decision to set the film in the future instead of Rand’s surreal 1950s was a major error—although probably dictated by budget concerns.
No, the fault in the movie lies in the screenplay, and it becomes clear when you compare it to The Fountainhead, the script of which Rand herself wrote, and defended doggedly against alterations. Rand—whose dream it was to work in Hollywood and who ended up writing treatments and screenplays for Cecil B. DeMille—knew well enough the differences between what a film and a novel demand. In a novel, you can have scenes like, say, the passage in which Dagny Taggart, riding on the initial run of the John Galt Line, goes inside the engine and looks at the motors (pp. 239-249)—which is some of Rand’s finest writing. But in a movie you can only see and hear characters from the outside, so symbolic action and gesture and dialogue have to do all the work. In her screenplay for The Fountainhead, therefore, Rand omitted everything about the Stoddard Temple, which is a major part of the book. Instead, she focused on the construction and blowing up of Courtlandt, which is a relatively small part of the novel, compared to the Stoddard Temple. She took out all of the backstory of Ellsworth Toohey, and stripped down the backstories of Keating and Wynand so that they could be compressed into the first half hour. The result is a movie that is quite unlike the book in some ways—and yet still conveys what is essential about the book, both in terms of plot and sense of life. It’s a different experience from the book, and yet, in the idiom of film, it is somehow the same.
Ironically, Atlas errs by trying to be too much like the book. By trying to include too much, the movie necessarily distorts, squeezes things out, waters them down. For example, in the party scene, why does Philip Rearden approach James Taggart to tell him Balph Eubank’s latest bon mot? This occurs in the novel, but it does so in the context of a passage that Rand carefully orchestrates to link the various offhand comments that different characters make into a single unified theme. It’s a great work of integration on her part. By omitting all of that from the screenplay, the filmmakers transform this brief exchange between Taggart and Rearden into a basically pointless ten seconds. Do that time and time again, and you end up with a movie that really ought to be called Scenes from Atlas Shrugged.
The attempt to keep everything—from the “Equalization of Opportunity Bill” and the “Anti Dog-Eat-Dog Rule,” to the meeting with Robert Stadler and Dagny’s refusal to debate her decision to use Rearden metal—results in a boring movie because virtually all the screentime consists, as Roger Ebert noted, of “a series of business meetings in luxurious retro leather-and-brass board rooms and offices, and restaurants and bedrooms.” Rand breaks up these things in the novel by giving us the flashback to Dagny and Francisco’s teenage years, or Dagny’s silent contemplation of the statue of Nat Taggart, or even Eddie Willers walking through the streets of New York. Not only do we get none of these in the film—possibly for budgetary reasons—but we get very bland versions of them. Probably the worst was Hank Rearden telling the audience what happened to the 20th Century Motor Company—thus basically destroying the Bum’s Speech (pp. 661-672). And although we get Hank’s affair with Dagny, we get none of his hostility to her; he never treats her with contempt or anger as he does in the book (due to his sense of guilt about having cheated on his wife). Instead, we get a bland romance story.
Rand was a devout romanticist, with a keen eye for the dramatic gesture. Atlas is full of them, from the old soldiers lining up to guard the John Galt Line with their antique rifles, to the dollar signs on the cigarettes, to the lightning destroying the tree at Dagny’s childhood home. Virtually none of these appear in the movie, and that’s a shame, because they are peculiarly cinematic. They were excised to make way for explanation after explanation after meeting after meeting, possibly because meetings are cheaper, but (I think) mostly out of an unwillingness to make the cuts necessary to include them. The result is a stage play, not a movie. Compare that to The Fountainhead. For all its flaws as a movie, The Fountainhead keeps the dramatic gestures—everything from Dominique throwing the statue down the airshaft to Roark operating a hydraulic drill, to the infamous rape scene—and omits many of the party scenes and discussions and characters who work in the novel, but cannot be accommodated into the film. Thus it succeeds despite the mediocre acting and terrible music.
Rand spent 13 years writing and re-writing Atlas, and she put a very high premium on integration and selectivity. The resulting novel is a massive, perfectly smooth sphere, carefully balanced so that every little bit contributes to and fits proportionately in the whole. This is just what makes so many people dislike it—because Rand demands that you to take it all or not at all. Transforming it into a film requires an equal commitment to selectivity and integration, not mere transferral from novel to script. That commitment isn’t to be found here. Instead, the film tries to cover too much, and thus dilutes it all. As a result, it relies too heavily on the novel to back up its claims—so that it will please fans, but will probably leave newcomers a little bewildered.
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