http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv_and_radio/story/0,3604,792774,00.html
White Teeth: JW's in T.V. End of World Program
by Kenneson 3 Replies latest jw friends
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Matty
TV review
The TV adaptation of White Teeth, which starts this week, will be a massive boost to Zadie Smith's already huge profile. But have the makers done justice to her work?
Mark Lawson
Monday September 16, 2002 The GuardianJohn Grisham's rules for writing successful fiction include the suggestion that the protagonists should be facing a deadline. This tip has been taken seriously in the first part of White Teeth (Tuesday, 10pm, Channel 4), in which the world is due to end.
The earth's termination date - the final midnight of 1974 - has been confirmed to the Willesden branch of Jehovah's Witnesses in a letter from America. Clara (Naomie Harris), the young Jamaican daughter of a leading player in these final days, helps her mother to warn north-west London of the need to repent. But, in a chat-up line that displays a genius beyond most teenagers, biker Ryan (Charlie Creed-Miles) persuades her that, if the end is coming, she ought to come before the end.
White Teeth is adapted from Zadie Smith's novel by Simon Burke and directed by Julian Jarrold. Most literary fiction on television has the advantage that almost no one in the audience will have read it. Many writers - Jeanette Winterson, David Lodge, Hanif Kureishi, PD James, Ruth Rendell - were popularised by small-screen versions of novels with previously moderate sales.
Smith, though, has close to a million readers even before the intervention of TV, which makes this exercise more like doing Austen or Dickens: the ratings will include a swathe of viewers watching like lawyers to check for default from the novel. As a cross-generational saga with a visual image in its title, Smith's book is suited to the medium and the director uses her dental metaphor nicely.
Allowed only four hours, they treat the piece as four self-contained short-stories, concentrating on one character, with background cameos from people in previous weeks. The compression is often ingenious so that, for example, Samad Iqbal (Om Puri) is introduced in a scene that seems incidental - using the urinal in a restaurant - but which economically sets up the erotic envy that drives his own story.
Even so, in its opening scenes, the TV White Teeth feels less fresh than the book did. This is largely because the drama's chosen starting points - young girl with bible-blinded mother, communal life in multi-racial London - keep bumping into two of the most celebrated examples of televised modern literature: The Buddha of Suburbia and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.
Gradually, though, Smith is allowed to gain some distance from Kureishi and Winterson. Picking up from the structure of Smith's novel, a frequent device of director and adaptor is the standard dramatic situation that reverses expectations at its end. Most deflowerings of young women in fiction are disappointing and lead immediately to pregnancy; Clara's initiation is orgasmic and contracepted.
Many other subsequent scenes - a mother coming home unexpectedly, a motorbike accident - also amusingly defeat clich. When a Willesden bigot roars abuse at an Indian bride, she screeches back. An attempted exhaust-pipe suicide is thwarted because the driver chooses a no-parking zone. Some of the producers worked on Our Friends in the North and there are familial resemblances both in the wig-and-costume historical flow (characters are followed from 1974 to the present) and in the use of Top 40 time markers - T. Rex, Cockney Rebel, Slade and so on - which occasionally make the project feel like a soundtrack album that has had a drama based on it.
The big difference from Our Friends is the weight given to the politics. In White Teeth, we learn that Heath's three-day week is in operation only from a passing comment and, while the non-white characters are occasionally victimised by their skin, racism is never the theme of the piece, as it would have been if the drama had been made in the 70s rather than set in that period.
This isn't a weakness because such intolerance is itself now more subtle and underground than it used to be. Typical of White Teeth's nicely sly treatment of the subject is the second episode (set in 1984), when white infant teacher Poppy Burt-Jones (Maggie O'Neill) starts an affair with Samad Iqbal. It's made clear that her operatic gestures of multi-culturalism - a love for the food and music of "the east" - are a form of racism. Posing as colour-blindness, her conquest of Samad is a kind of erotic colonialism.
Julian Jarrold confirms the impression given by his versions of Great Expectations and Crime and Punishment that he is the most innovative director of literary adaptations. Some find his style self-advertising - if the camera isn't on stilts, it's on skates - but the point is that what almost always disappears when a book comes to the screen is authorial tone. The conventional solution to this problem has always been voiceover narration. In a way far more true to the medium he's working in, Jarrold's visual flashes provide an organising visual style to replace the missing prose style.
His signature crane shot - used in White Teeth to look down on Jehovah's Witnesses gazing towards heaven, and on cars circling roundabouts - is also especially apt for televised books, because the long look down is the perspective of the novelist and of God. As television, White Teeth carries a few narrative snags of spinach. A PTA meeting in a trendy London school is too broadly satirised and Robert Bathurst is too good an actor to be playing, after Cold Feet, another middle-class snob with another son called Josh.
But - unlike the safe and retrograde Shackleton - this drama feels in keeping with Channel 4's remit as a network. If the book receives the usual sales boost from televisation, then Zadie Smith will soon have the largest readership of any serious novelist in Britain. In her brief phenomenal career, she has frequently seemed an uncommonly lucky writer and her good fortune continues with the people who brought her debut novel to the screen.
Guardian Unlimited Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
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Matty
Just a reminder that this four-part adaptation of Zadie Smith's book starts tonight at 22:00 on Channel 4 in the UK.
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Fe2O3Girl
I look forward to seeing the adaptation, having read the book. The JW thread is a minor part of the storyline, which is just as well, as Zadie Smith has obviously never met a JW, and did not bother to do any research into the lifestyle and beliefs of JWs. She threw in some buzzwords - Watchtower, Kingdom Hall - but most references to JWs bear no resemblance to reality. This is a work of fiction, but, if you are going to use JW characters, why not bother making it accurate?