Читать книгу From Page to Screen / Vom Buch zum Film - Группа авторов - Страница 20

Despite his remarkable forays in adult literature and autobiography with works like Boy, Going Solo, Tales of the Unexpected or Kiss Kiss, Roald Dahl will probably be remembered as one of the most salient authors of children’s literature of the second half of the 20^th century. His extensive bibliography includes titles like The Twits, James and the Giant Peach, The Witches, The BFG, or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, among many others. The global success of these stories has not, obviously, gone unnoticed by the film industry, and many of them have been adapted to the screen in the last decades. From Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Margulies, Wolper, Stuart, 1971) to The BFG (Spielberg et al., Spielberg, 2016) through James and the Giant Peach (Burton, Di Novi, Selick, 1996) or Fantastic Mr. Fox (Anderson et al., Anderson, 2009), Dahl’s work has been recurrently enlivened with varying success. One of the most significant difficulties one must face when braving the endeavor of adapting these books is the complex backstory most of them share. Hidden behind the appearance of innocuous plots and light entertainment, Dahl’s narrative conceals a deep social critique that addresses myriad problems related to children, parenthood, education, and other core aspects of the past and present social fabric. In this regard, Matilda (Dahl, 1988; 2016) is not an exception.

Matilda tells the story of a five-year-old girl. She is extremely intelligent and loves books. She lives with her parents, the Wormwoods, and her brother in England, but she is ignored by them. Her parents only pay her some attention to command her to stop reading and watch TV, which is what they always do, or to tell her that she is an ignorant, a cheat or a liar. At one point, she gets fed up with the situation and decides to teach her father a lesson; from that moment on, whenever he insults or mistreats her, Matilda takes revenge by playing different pranks on Mr. Wormwood, like putting superglue on his hat or hiding a speaking parrot in the chimney to scare him. When she goes to school, she finds another bully adult, the headmistress Miss Trunchbull, who hates children and abuses them verbally and physically. However, Matilda will develop an extraordinary magical power which will help her get rid of the tyrant Trunchbull. This apparently simple and children-oriented plot conceals quite serious topics such as the importance of educational methods, mistreatment, or adults’ totalitarian practices and lack of ethics (Mr. Wormwood’s illegal business with stolen cars being a good case in point), among others, which are quite relevant for the development of the story.

Since its publication in 1988, more than 17 million copies of the book have been sold all over the world. Such literary success and impact inevitably grabbed Hollywood’s attention, and Matilda was finally turned into a film in 1996 under the direction of Danny DeVito. However, to what extent did the transition between two different media affected the original product? Which role did the Hollywood machinery play in this process? The present paper seeks to explore these and other questions as it builds on the assumption that the context of production/reception together with the constraints of a given film genre play a major role in the decisions made when adapting a book into a film. On these bases, the following pages seek to meet the following objectives:

– To analyze the impact of the aforementioned items on the film adaptation of Matilda (DeVito et al., De Vito, 1996).

– To explore the extent of those changes in the characterization of the protagonist.

– To determine whether the ambivalence of the character (a heroine for some, a villain for others) is maintained in DeVito’s movie.