Day 5 The World According to Garp (1982)

There is a moment that all readers and movie fans fear. It is a moment fraught with anticipation, hope anxiety and a general sense of being overwhelmed by what is before you. That is the moment when you sit down to watch a film made out of a book that you love. Sometimes it works out for both audiences, the readers and the viewers, Harry Potter fans are likely to agree. Other times, the readers and the viewers are looking for tar and feathers and someone to blame (See the Dark Tower for reference). Occasionally there are movies , like “The Godfather” or “Jaws” that transcend the books they are based on. Most of the time you get something in the middle.

I read “The World According to Garp” my senior year in college. It became my favorite book and has remained so for forty plus years. It is a difficult book because it contains several novels within the main novel, and it covers a variety of characters that are both appealing and repugnant. The tone of drama fused with humor may be difficult at times but a skilled writer can often overcome that. The question is, can a movie manage to convey a complex story, with shocking shifts in tone, and terrible tragedies that are meaningful to the characters and readers? Also, can it do so in a commercially viable time limit. Now a days, streaming services can do justice to a book by allowing the story to unfold in ten or twelve hours as a limited series. In 1982, that was not really an option and theatrical films usually averaged two hours.

So in 1982, four years after the novel was published and I became a John Irving fan, this movie was made and I was concerned. I really wanted to like the movie and did not want the book to be diminished by it. At the end of this post, I will tell you the circumstances of my seeing the film and you should be able to ascertain by then whether I was mortified, satisfied or jubilant.

“The World According to Garp” is a proto-feminist story , at least to a point because by the time the story is halfway through, feminism was on the rise and the one of the main characters in the story is a hero (would saying heroine be antithetical to the point?) of the movement. The story is a thirty year set of tales about an unconventional woman, her lust filled and talented son, and the crazy world that they are living through. The plot of the movie follows the plot of the book pretty closely, although a long period of time in Europe is cut out, and the number of sexual imbroglios is reduced. In the long run, the plot is simply the story of a man’s life told through friendships and challenging moments. Some of which are painful to live through, but many are amusing and insightful at the same time.

This was the second feature to star comedian Robin Williams, after the ill-fated “Popeye”. This was an opportunity to show he was not just Mork from Ork, but a Juilliard trained actor who could handle dramatic moments as well as the laughs. I thought, and most would probably agree, that he carried that off quite well her. Although maybe a little old to be playing the high school senior he is in his opeing scenes, he was still young enough to come across as sexually naïve and then play the part of an unfaithful husband who can seduce a babysitter. Glen Close made her movie debut in this film as his Mother, Jenny Fields, the eventual author of an autobiography that becomes a political manifesto. This was also the first of her eight Academy Award Nominations. John Lithgow had been in a half dozen or so movies before this, but in a breakout role, he is incredibly sympathetic as the transgendered character that loves Garp’s family as his own. He too was nominated for his role in this film.

A clash between cultures and mores is set up right at the beginning as Jenny explains to her parents, played by Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn for one scene, how it is she came to have a baby. The envelope pushing scenario gets fully explained later on, but it sets up the fact that everything that jenny does, and does with Garp, is different than what convention might have called for. The credits of the film start with a flying baby Garp, tossed in the air and caught by Mom, who then confronts her parents in a charming exposition scene. There are a series of sequences that follow where Garp is played by child actors and his childhood is detailed enough for us to understand why he is so different. Finally, twenty five minutes into the film, Williams shows up and plays Garp as a High School senior, smitten by the Wrestling Coaches’ daughter.

I’d love to see a movie based on “The Pension Grillparzer”, the novella that Garp writes in the book, but it was too complicated to visualize for this film. The story of “The Magic Gloves” is substituted and it is more simple to visualize and have Williams tell as well as giving us a comic death that is tragic and wins over Helen, played by Mary Beth Hurt. The sexual escapades of Garp in Austrian brothels is eliminated and reduced to a single night in New York City, that consists mostly of his indignant Mother questioning a prostitute and then paying for Garp to partake. The final major shortcut is the condensing of his relationship with Ellen James, the girl that radical feminists hijack as a icon in the most horrific and morally repugnant manner possible. Garp writes about her after the family tragedy that both he and his wife share responsibility for. In the movie, a book about Ellen James becomes the tonic for Garp and Helen to reconcile over. although it does create the requisite political turmoil. In the novel, Garp pours his bitterness and resentment into a piece of violence pornography that becomes a bestseller and a continuing source of tension in his relationship. “The World According to Bensenhaver” would have required another movie to tell the whole story in the way the novel did.

George Roy Hill, the director of Garp, is responsible for five films I loved: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, The Great Waldo Pepper, A Little Romance and the greatest sports movie of all time Slap Shot. So as I said, I was nervous when this film was coming out, but I had that reassurance in my back pocket to rest on.

The movie opened at the end of July, and I saw it then, but first I saw it in an entirely different place. In the Spring of 1982, I was finished with grad school, I was uncertain of my future. I did not have a job lined up and I was a married man. There was going to be an advanced screening of the movie in Bovard Auditorium at USC in early May. It was during the day in the middle of the week, so my wife who was working would not be attending with me. I went to see it with some of my students from the USC Debate team, Kids that I had been coaching and I would be saying goodbye to at the end of the term. It was a bittersweet moment because I was at a turning point in my life, but I had great memories and friends that I would be moving on from, at least temporarily. I was not only anxious about the movie, I was sad and melancholic about my life at the moment. This film put me in a much better mood, despite it’s own sadness, and I have remembered that emotional transion ever since. The drive home that afternoon was not sad about where I was in life, it was hopeful. In the long run, the movie is not as great as the book, but it too is hopeful. So it falls somewhere in the middle of that continuum I referred to earlier, but much close to the “Jaws end than “The Dark Tower” end.