In 1898, the expatriate American writer Henry James, a solitary man in search of even more solitude, was looking to move out of London. His brother, William, had already established a house in Boston. His sister, Alice, had died. He was the only one of his siblings who, at 54, was “homeless”: he was still renting. He found a house about two hours outside of London, in the East Sussex borough of Rye. He believed that the move would be beneficial for his writing, but he was still rather anxious about it.
Before the dawn of the U-Haul era and our modern proclivity for continuous movement (the average American now moves about 11 times in his or her life), it used to be that buying a house was like buying a coffin — you were expected to die in it. Imagining what it would be like to move into what is now known as Lamb House, James, like so many writers who transmute their traumas into art, turned his terror of being uprooted from his apartment in Kensington into a story, which follows a young woman who gradually grows more and more unnerved by the strange things she witnesses while caring for two eccentric children in a large, isolated, possibly haunted English country estate. The Turn of the Screw, the novella that emerged out of James’s fears and anxieties (as well as from a story told to him by the archbishop of Canterbury), is now widely regarded as one of the genuine masterpieces of horror fiction.
At 55, the Italian-Canadian director Floria Sigismondi is almost exactly as old as James was when the great writer penned his Gothic classic. And similar to James, who at that stage of his life was looking to move from dense literary novels to more commercially successful fiction, Sigismondi is now seeking midcareer fame. Thus far, Sigismondi has primarily been known for her work in music videos. She has directed music videos for singers and bands, including David Bowie, Christina Aguilera, Marilyn Manson, Justin Timberlake, Katy Perry, Leonard Cohen, and Interpol. Having achieved just about everything a director can achieve in that medium, she has now set her eyes on the world of feature film.
She could hardly have given herself a more ambitious project: a film adaptation of The Turn of the Screw. Not only is the book a classic, but a prior adaptation, Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961), is undoubtedly one of the greatest horror films of all time (Pauline Kael called it the best ghost movie she’d ever seen). With a screenplay co-written by Truman Capote, black-and-white chiaroscuro camerawork, a wonderfully creepy score, exceptional acting by Deborah Kerr, and two classic “creepy children” performances from the child actors Martin Stephens and Pamela Franklin, The Innocents perfectly captures the mysterious, unsettling nature of James’s unsettling novella. The same cannot quite be said for Sigismondi’s effort, The Turning.
The bar for The Turning was a very high one, so to say that it does not reach the artistic standards set by James and Clayton is not to utterly indict the film. Sigismondi has not created a particularly terrible horror film (a respectable achievement when you consider how many truly terrible horror films are churned out every year), but her departures from James’s novella are jarring and ultimately doom The Turning.
In James’s novella, as well as in The Innocents, Miles and Flora are children. Miles is meant to be no more than nine or 10 years old. But for whatever reason, Sigismondi and her screenwriters felt the need to age Miles, and so in The Turning, he is not a disturbing young boy but a moody adolescent who plays electric guitar and pees with his bathroom door open. When the original Miles speaks to the governess in ways that are suggestive and even flirtatious, it is alarming because it is monstrous for a child to possess sexual knowledge — it is a symbol of paradisaical innocence prematurely lost. But when the teenage Miles plants a clumsy, not-so-welcome kiss on the governess, or when he occasionally speaks to her in a somewhat flirtatious manner, it is just plain banal.
The problems with the Miles character speak to one of the larger problems with The Turning. In both The Innocents and The Turn of the Screw, effects are created through subtlety, irony, suggestion, and insinuation. James’s novella and Clayton’s film are great works of art because both are able to hint at terror without being explicit. The Turning hits us over the head with it for 94 minutes.
Sigismondi’s attempts to add a backstory (and a name) for the governess are helpful. In James’s novella, we know little about her other than that she is summoned by Flora’s and Miles’s uncle (a character who is entirely omitted in this film) to come look after the orphaned children, whom he has no interest in raising. In The Turning, the governess, named Kate (played by Mackenzie Davis, who does her best with a subpar script), is a kindergarten teacher who lost her father at a young age. She finds out about an intriguing-looking job as a live-in nanny and instructor for an orphaned child in an extravagant estate in rural Maine. Sigismondi thereby provides us with some insight into the governess’s possible motivations for taking such a job: She likes teaching young children; she empathizes with those forced to grow up without parents; and, as she tells her roommate, she’ll be going from teaching “25 screaming kids to one little girl. How hard could it be?”
But Sigismondi’s efforts to craft an entirely new ending for the novella are less inspiring. Perhaps she thought that James’s original ending would be too horrifying for modern audiences. Here, she appears to forget that the very point of James’s novella was to enable readers to feel the kind of fear that he imagined he would feel when moving into an isolated English country house. Her attempt to improve on James reminds me of the joke about the Yiddish version of Shakespeare being “farteischt und farbessert” (“translated and improved”). When it comes to some classic books and films, it’s usually better to leave well enough alone.
James’s move from the city to the country, despite his fears of what it might entail for him, resulted in some of the best writing of his career. In addition to The Turn of the Screw, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl were all written after his move from London to Rye. I hope that Sigismondi’s move from music videos to feature films proves to be as productive for her as it was for James. And I hope even more strongly that she’ll refrain from attempting to adapt any further works of “the Master.”
Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer living in New York, where he is a Ph.D. candidate at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema.
