Available for $10.17 (both!) in paperback at Amazon.com
Buy them if: You’re a sucker for books that have “Now a Major Motion Picture” printed on the cover
Don’t buy them if: You’re excited for books that will exceed the films. They don’t.
Until very recently, I could only think of a single film that rated as superior to the book upon which it was based. (Extraordinarily, Annie Proulx met her match in Ang Lee of all people…) And then somehow, in the span of two months, not one, but two books made their way into my hands...and then promptly fell short of the precedent set by their silver screen dopplegangers.
Both Sideways and Up in the Air were heralded as smart little films, succeeding with quirky characters and elegantly realistic worlds, each devoid of Hollywood glamorizing. If anything, the human flaws and the dull settings gave these slightly askew visions of life a cache of credibility. The big screen Miles and Jack were certainly compelling - if slightly unlikeable – anti-heroes. And while I didn’t love the film version of Walter Kirn’s ‘Airworld’ tale, I could certainly relate to characters for whom flight attendants and plastic silverware are standard parts of a workday.
Given this, who wouldn’t be queuing up to grab a copy of the paperback in their local bookstore? After all, the book is always better than the film, right? At first glance, Sideways offers support for this maxim. There go the same characters, launching off on the same wine-soaked adventure. It’s no trouble at all conjuring a mental image featuring Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church. In fact, you won’t start to notice discrepancies for quite some time. The book, like the film, moves through entertainingly harmless descriptions of ‘boys being boys’ alcohol-soaked revelry. It follows the pair gamely as one seeks wine-induced euphoria while the other pursues a more risqué siren’s call before his impending nuptials. All in all, a good, clean (well, for a story centered on DUIs and cuckolding) tale.
But at some point the words take a loopy turn away from realism and the whole thing begins to derail. The movie was wise to include only hints of the really silly scenes as a means to set off its more depressing tones, but author Hackett goes at them full throttle with a style that is more Al Franken – pre-Senate version, of course – than I would prefer. Somewhere around the mythical, midnight boar hunt, Hackett loses a grip on the pseudo-realism that director Alex Payne manages to maintain through to the movie’s conclusion. As a book, it’s still a welcome diversion from the real world, but as a fictional narrative it can only manage second place to its Hollywood successor.
Meanwhile, the cool, jaded and Clooney-ized Up in the Air available at your local Redbox offers such a distant take on Walter Kirn’s original (the pages and binding version) it could very well be marketed under a wholly different title and easily rendered unrecognizable. Kirn should be grateful this never came to pass. He would certainly sold far fewer copies! While the film itself doesn’t emerge flawless, the literary version is far more encumbered by woe, ego and depression that weigh too heavily and without balance.
Like Sideways, the novel is a bit overplagued by characters that operate a little too far outside reality for a reader to really identify – and therefore empathize – with them. Don’t get me wrong, I love the fantastic. To me, pure fictional storytelling, unyielding to reality, remains hallowed ground. But you can’t have it both ways. Using reality to excuse characters’ disingenuous actions, thoughts and words just feels like cheating when they are otherwise unbounded by these rules. It feels…icky. Like a setup. Don’t ask me to choose between Door Number One and Door Number Two and, oh by the way, please ignore the screaming behind Two, it’s nothing to be concerned with…
Such is the feeling you might get paging through a tale that oddly juxtaposes real entities – Mariott and MGM – with oddly familiar figments like ‘Desert Air’ and ‘MythTech.’ While it’s not completely uncouth to introduce what are essentially pseudonyms for real-world counterparts, the resulting interactions feel disjointed. It’s as if J.K. Rowling asked you to believe that Hogwarts students don’t eat. Flying broomsticks? Sure. People who don’t get hungry? It’s fiction out of context, something that subtly plagues the entire length of this book. Not enough to pain, but adequately annoying.
All in all, even without flaws serious enough to dock Up in the Air major points, there are enough minor blemishes to recommend against it. If you were hoping for fuller, more nuanced take on the what you saw in theaters…you got the best there is already. With popcorn. Quit while you’re ahead.
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