Accidents will happen/ We only hit and run/ I don't want to hear about it/ Cuz I know what I've done.
- Elvis Costello
No one who's read Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces - and they now number in the hundreds of thousands - would describe the novel as happy. Sure, it features redemptive acts of love, acts of witness, selfless displays of courage, celebrations of decencies - but the horrors of the Holocaust and its aftershocks reverberate on virtually all of its almost 300 pages.
Now, with the much-anticipated movie adaptation set to go into theatres this weekend, Michaels's devotees will have the opportunity to consider the 1996 book anew, not least because the film has a decidedly happier "ending" than the novel, happier, too, than the version that had a well-received world premiere at last year's Toronto International Film Festival. (Spoiler alert: The following paragraph describes the ending.)
This is because its Canadian director, Jeremy Podeswa, has trimmed the $11-million film by roughly a couple of minutes, eliminating the bus accident in Athens that claims his protagonist, Holocaust survivor and poet Jakob Beer, and his wife, Michaela.
The version in theatres on Friday ends with the oft-brooding Beer, at 60, blissfully in love, warmed by the Greek sunshine and fervently hoping that his (second) wife is pregnant with their first child.
Michaels herself called the changes "controversial" in a telephone interview last week. The novelist, who was 38 when Fugitive Pieces was published, was consulted extensively by Podeswa as he wrote draft after draft of the screenplay in the five or six years leading up to its actual filming in the spring of 2006 in Southern Ontario and the Greek island of Hydra. "Anne had written this beautiful novel," Podeswa observed, "and I really wanted her to be happy about what we were doing."
Today, Michaels is not prepared to disown the re-edited film. True, she wasn't included in the conversation that resulted in the excision of the car accident, but she knows "it can't have been an easy one for Jeremy." For his part, Podeswa insists "all the beautiful things in the movie that were there before are . . . still there. The change obviously affects the feeling you have when you walk out of the movie and some of what the movie is saying... But 95 per cent, 96 per cent of the movie is absolutely untouched."
Podeswa, 46, insisted the happier ending is not the result of pressure from its U.S. distributor, Samuel Goldwyn Films. "The discussion about the new edit happened pretty early, actually," he said. As the film got shown here and there last fall after its Toronto premiere, "we were getting a lot of feedback that made us really think about it. A lot. So it was in discussion for a while and we really kind of felt [a re-edit] was going to be the way to go."
Simply put, a great many movers and shakers felt the ending was too abrupt, too despairing. Admittedly, readers of the Michaels novel discover right on Page 1 that Jakob Beer (played in the movie by Stephen Dillane of The Hours fame) and Michaela (Ayelet Zurer) die in a car accident in 1993, with the result that Beer's death, in Michaels's word, "haunts" the unspooling of Beer's own haunted childhood in Nazi-occupied Poland and Greece through to his new life in Canada in the remainder of the text. Moreover, the death illuminates one of the key themes in the novel, as voiced by Athos, the Greek archeologist (played by Rade Sherbedzija) who rescues the seven-year-old Beer: "It's a mistake to think it's the small things we control and not the large; it's the other way around."
Still, Podeswa argued it never was his intention nor that of Michaels to shape a film that didn't have a strong inspirational element. Said Michaels: "The film itself gets so much right. It's really drenched with sorrow in so many ways, but also there's this fantastic courage, emotional and physical courage that comes out of the film. . . . There are scenes of aching tenderness, and the actual last few minutes, where there's so much of the book's text [in voice-over], I'm very glad that that is intact."
Another significant, although perhaps less controversial change to Michaels's novel involves its second part, which revolves around the life of Ben, a young acquaintance of Beer, a university professor and the only child of anxious Holocaust survivors. Podeswa's screenplay largely abandons Ben's story - it takes up about 90 of the novel's closing pages - to integrate Ben the character much more tightly in the orbit of Athos and Jakob and later Michaela to "make it feel like one big film."
All of which was fine with Michaels. "There were things Jeremy needed to say in this film, clearly," she said - an allusion, in part, to the fact that Podeswa's father was a Holocaust survivor. "And the story of Ben was one way in which he was able to make the film his. . . . I encouraged this. I always said whoever made this film would have to have something at stake personally."
Podeswa agreed. "Certainly that was one of the reasons I wanted to make this movie," he noted. As the son of "someone who's gone through those kind of experiences, I understand what that feels like. Not to say that 'I am Ben,' but I understand that perspective."
Will there ever be a director's cut or perhaps a director-author cut for DVD release? Podeswa said he and the film's Canadian producer, Robert Lantos, have spoken about that possibility. "But I don't think there will be. I think in the end it's important to just stand by the thing for what it is. . . . I still think it's a beautiful movie and it says all the things I wanted it to say. . . . I don't think it's necessary to confuse the issue around the movie right now."
Added Michaels: "Leaving the ending aside, what's said in the film, there are so many subtle truths expressed, especially between Athos and the boy [the young Jakob, played by Robbie Kay]. . . . I think that's the thing to keep our focus on." Podeswa, she said, has acted with integrity. "A film is not a book . . . and right from the beginning, I told Jeremy that he had to do what he must do. I'm very, very pleased with how it's turned out."