These thoughts have most recently been prompted by two highly intelligent films that have been made from novels by distinguished authors: Steve Jacobs’s Disgrace, from J.M. Coetzee’s 1999 novel of the same name, and Isabel Coixet’s Elegy, derived from Philip Roth’s short novel The Dying Animal (2001). Already a point emerges in the way one retains the name of the novel and the other doesn’t: does this mean that Jacobs is more concerned than Coixet with filmgoers’ having his source in mind? And what are the implications for such decisions in relation to the sort of film we get in each case? Further, who knows what kinds of other influences may have been at work in determining this, including crass commercial considerations that readers of this journal would scarcely credit?

A still from Disgrace (2009), directed by Steve Jacobs (Paladin)

My main emphasis in this piece is on Disgrace, an Australian–South African production based on a novel by a South African author now living in Australia, but the fact of these two films arriving on our screens at roughly the same time drew my attention to what they had in common. They raise, in different ways, formal issues about the processes of adaptation, and they have some common thematic elements in their concern with sexual relations between older academic men (both, as it happens, called David) and much younger women who are, or have been, their students. (An ageing academic myself, I must say in passing how gratifying it is to see these raunchy protagonists as distinct from the dry-as-dust, ivory-tower image more often associated with the profession. End of irrelevance.)

In Disgrace, David Lurie, aged fifty-two, exploits his position to engage a young woman in an affair from which she hardly knows how to extricate herself. In doing so, as well as the dubious morality involved, he compromises his professional integrity in relation to her status as student. An inquiry, in which he refuses to defend his behaviour, leads to his dismissal and disgrace; he leaves Cape Town to try to live with his daughter, Lucy, on her isolated farm, where she is the victim of rape and he of assault by three young thugs. The male sexual violence involved is an extreme version of the cruelty and dominance he has practised on his student. This David, who can’t resist a sexual affair with an older friend of Lucy’s, eventually becomes concerned with a life outside his own, and he and Lucy arrive at a rapprochement which may or may not be permanent. These key events of the novel are also the spine of the film version.

The David of The Dying Animal, ten years older than Lurie and very conscious of his age, at least waits until his students’ results are out before making a move on a gorgeous Cuban, Consuela Castillo, who, at twenty-four, has a certain maturity lacking in the rest of his class. This David loses himself in the physical passion he experiences with this young woman, torturing himself with jealousy at the thought of the young men who have been or will be her lovers. His mature, intermittent mistress, a smart executive called Carolyn, is deeply displeased to find evidence of his duplicity, but neither Roth nor the filmmaker is concerned with anything so conventional as a sexual triangle. In both novel and film, David moves towards a reconciliation of sexual imperatives and other claims – the claims of compassion when Consuela, a year or so after their affair has ended, comes to him for comfort when she becomes ill.

There are some crucial differences in the ways in which Coetzee and Roth go about rendering these two flawed lives, differences with implications for filmmakers. Coetzee maintains a distance, an observational detachment from David Lurie, making the reader privy to the essential passages of his life in a spare prose almost lapidary in its precision and refusal of commentary and decorative effect. The real location of Roth’s study of a man’s sexual life is, in contrast to the vast landscape Coetzee suggests, inside David Kepesh’s own mind. The novel’s drama is enacted in a first-person narrative that sometimes quotes other people’s replies, but it is above all a matter of a man’s continuous rumination on his own life, and symptomatically ends with an exchange of dialogue that is no more than his answering his own misgivings.

Now, film cannot quite do this, not even Being John Malkovich (1999), in which a puppeteer gains access to the head of the eponymous actor, who is, incidentally, the star of Disgrace. That film cannot find an exact equivalent for a novel’s first-person narration is not meant as a criticism but as a statement of intermedial differences. Elegy makes some use of voice-over, with David (Ben Kingsley) voicing on the soundtrack some of the preoccupations of the novel, but voice-over inevitably has its limits, and film must find other ways to make us privy to David’s mind if it wants, and it seems to want, to do so. In this cause, what screenwriter Nicholas Meyer and director Coixet have settled for is to be sparing in the use of voice-over and to develop the scenes in which David and his poet friend George (Dennis Hopper) meet to the status of chorus. George, literally a ‘dying animal’, though younger than David, provides a sounding board for the messy tensions of David’s life. Moreover, the film’s insistent use of close-ups, especially of David and Consuela (an aptly stunning Penélope Cruz) in two-shots which seem to define his intensity and its causes, keep us focusing on David’s inner life. But, at the risk of becoming unduly ‘talky’, the film doesn’t try to emulate the novel’s detailed sense of David’s background, of the formative influences of the foolish 1960s.

Returning to Disgrace, Jacobs has taken a masterly novel and made an uncompromisingly brilliant film from this source. He has clearly maintained the novel’s overall narrative contours: the act that leads to his disgrace; the uneasy coming to terms with his daughter (another point of comparison with Elegy: Kepesh and his son have an even more bristly rapport); the rape, and a good deal more. As well, though, it is as if he has also intended to preserve Coetzee’s curious tone of objectivity in the chronicling of these events; as though only by such an approach could he ensure our thinking about the issues put before us. There is perhaps a Brechtian denial of easy emotional involvement in favour of a tougher engagement with tough matters.

Penelope Cruz and Ben Kingsley in Elegy, directed by Isabel Coixet (Lakeshore Entertainment)

Whereas Elegy, in its focus on the inside of David Kepesh’s head, largely resists eye-catching, big-city exteriors, Jacobs has let Steve Arnold’s camera boldly announce the stunning beauty of the South African countryside. He seems almost daring us to admire it without simultaneously registering the contrasting ugliness of so much of the life lived in it. It is as though Jacobs has sought – and found – a visual style that recalls Coetzee’s spareness. The camera’s discretion about the moments of violence and sexual activity works, as such restraint so often does, to sharpen our sense of the desecration that is being enacted. As a result, when the camera pulls back and up in the film’s final moments, it registers quite powerfully a positive note, embracing as it does Lucy’s replanting of her ravaged garden, David’s trudge up the hill to her house, and the new house, long in the building, of her neighbour Petrus.

Because the film has been similarly restrained in its musical score, the positive effect is reinforced by having on the soundtrack the lyrics of Byron’s ‘She walks in beauty’, set to music by David, who is writing an opera on the poet’s sojourn in Italy (and the work of the film’s composer, Anthony Partos). In John Malkovich as David, Jacobs has cast an actor who resists easy empathy, who has a screen persona that almost demands an intricate, cerebral response. Here, he kept reminding me of what he made of that other sexual predator, Gilbert Osmond, in Jane Campion’s version of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1996), and echoes like this, of other films, are another reason why there is more at work in how we react to any adaptation than just the preceding novel.

I greatly admire Coetzee’s novel, but, when I say that Jacobs has made a compelling film from it, this is not simply because he has sought to reproduce a cast of characters involved in a sequence of events that we know from the novel. It is a fine film because, taking its inspiration from a novel, as it happens, it has conceived its narrative as a cinematic whole, with its own point of view and its own style. If these correspond in some ways to Coetzee’s, that is another matter; but this is Jacobs’s film, not Coetzee’s.

In closing, I long for someone to dare film Coetzee’s wonderful Elizabeth Costello (2003), another story brushing with academic life, and full of talk in a way that so few films dare to be.