Taking Flight
N THE MIDDLE OF THIS DECADE, AROUND THE TIME WHEN EVEN mid-grade restaurants started “deconstructing” their desserts, a spate of American filmmakers yielded a greater-than-usual number of films that were not adaptations per se but not adaptations. Tarantino’s unchaining of Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 sustained both directors’ habits of reinterpreting borrowed blueprints they didn’t bother disguising. Woody Allen, a serial mimic, infused with enough elements of the Bernie Madoff scandal, plus some dramatic fillips of his own, that the movie passed as more than the retread it plainly was. Wes Anderson’s paid overt homage to multiple fictions by Stefan Zweig—an adaptation of his overall palette, not of any one piece. And , directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu from a screenplay he authored with three colleagues, centered around a possibly stupid, possibly sublime stage version of Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk and won, but by what stretch were they “original”? And if they are not adaptations, do we have a good name for what they are?
