In my experience
films that have been converted from successful books are can go any number of
ways. They can follow the book’s
plot faithfully, they can deviate wildly or they can omit the less cinematic
events. Gavin’s adaptation of
Iain Banks’ 1994 novel manages to succeed to some extent at each of these.
There are
passages which are totally faithful to the book, there are parts where little
details that seemed so important in the novel are missed and there are the
little cinematic embellishments that try to make up for the sense of guilty
excitement found on the page.
When Iain Banks
writes a book in the first person he has a unique, in my opinion, ability to get
inside his character’s mind and to write from their perspective, a talent
particularly impressive when the character is female (don’t try to apply this
to the Wasp Factory. It will only
confuse the issue even more).
In this film
version of Complicity, Johnny Lee Miller plays a passable lead but when reading
the book the character of Cameron Collie was played, in my head by a pre Star
Wars Ewan McGregor. There are
times when Johnny’s Scottish accent slips but lets face it, as Alec Guinness
would tell you, Ewan is no expert at accents either.
Complicity had a
limited Scottish cinema release and depending on the audience figures a
nation-wide release was planned. Having
seen the film I doubt that this will be viable and feel that the end product was
perhaps more suited to a two part television drama, however the half a dozen
people present when I saw it can at least say that they contributed to the
film’s success if it eventually does get a nation-wide release.
Fans of Iain Banks will know that Complicity is one of his more “straight” books in that it does not contain any element of fantasy. This is obviously why it lends itself to a simple screen adaptation by the same team that brought “The Crow Road” to BBC television. It should come as no surprise that the next Banks novel to receive the big screen treatment is the similarly straight “Espidair Street”. A film about a Progressive Rock band from Paisley? Who on earth would go and see that?