PRISONERS...the movie, the novel writer, the process of selling the rights...

MOVIE GOERS? ASPIRING FILM WRITERS? I'm not sure for whom I am writing this. Robin and I this evening saw, "Prisoners," a very hot new film starring Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal, among others. This is a big budget film, I gather, and we "researched" it by checking out the Rotten Tomatoes ratings; it far exceeds, for example, "Family," with Robert DiNero. After we saw this rather long film, Robin declared it not worth seeing, or discussing. She said most of the comments she heard later in the lady's room of the cinema were negative.

I could think only of Ayn Rand's phrase, "the latest compassionate study of human depravity," and how the competition to top the latest in frank appraisal of evil was a losing game. But let us not fall back on one phrase from Ayn Rand. No film, today, with this kind of budget and these actors (Hugh Jackman was Jean Valjean!), its acting, cinematography, pacing, settings--about which I know little--I confidently can pronounce professional. What else?

Two little girls disappear. The only clue is the presence of an RV in the street outside. Suffice it to say that the Hugh Jackman character goes berserk (he is a hunter, survivalist, patriot, gun owner, and all that) and kidnaps a young man who had been arrested as a suspect but released. This young man is described, with unintentional humor, in the film and reviews, as having "the IQ of a 10 year old." Well, obviously, a 10 year old has no lower average IQ than anyone else; you can have an IQ of 100 or 120 or 140 at 10 years old. Anyway, this young man in his 20's is portrayed as a lump, utterly inarticulate, fat and blunt... And the Jackman character decides from the look in his eyes that he did it. So he beats him into a truly bloody pulp and then creates a sort of torture chamber for him. To give credit where due, Hugh Jackman's portrayal of the sheer agony of the character as he is "forced" to continue the torture is fine indeed.

No need to go on. The true culprit is someone else who, as part of a sort of cult, is "fighting God" by kidnapping and killing kids so that their parents become (like the Hugh Jackman character) demonized. Snakes in coffins...insane serial killers... It all seems so over-worked--at least to me. Sure, we have the dramatic recent example to show it happens in real life. Interestingly, the guy who wrote the script, Aaron Guzikowski, had written it and sold the rights to the movie by 2010--long before the Ariel Castro Ohio kidnappings were revealed.

For my fellow novelists, who hope that what they write might become a feature film, the most interesting part of this story is an interview in 2010 with Guzikowski, a Brooklyn-born writer, who did nothing much more than would my fellow novelists or I. The interview, an un-inflected series of answers, is worth reading: http://www.limitemagazine.com/2009/08/qa...

Frankly, the story he tells of his success seems, on the face of it, inadequate to explain what occurred.... What do you think?

I will get no praise from young women for this post, I would suppose, since Hugh Jackman, in major polls of this kind, has been voted "the sexiest man alive." I rather resented that, but my wife put me down...