What a pleasure it would be to report that NBC had done a splendid job on its remake of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (Sunday at 8 p.m., Ch. 2).
Alas, we'll have to find our pleasure elsewhere.Certainly there's nothing wrong with the casting of Anthony Quinn as Santiago, the old Cuban fisherman, in NBC's film. Quinn looks wonderfully white-haired and weather-beaten, well up to the task of playing the Hemingway hero who makes one last grand stand against his own mortality as he battles with a giant fish.
But writer Roger O. Hirson and director Jud Taylor have played around with the story and the circumstances, and the net result is to dilute the impact and meaning of the tale. You'd think they would have at least been intimidated by the book's credentials. Published in 1952, it won Hemingway not only the Pulitzer Prize, but the Nobel Prize in literature as well.
Unfortunately, honors like that mean little to adapters who want to make material more "commercial" and more "accessible" to the audience. But they insult the audience as well as the material in their quest to rob the story of its symbolism.
Adding the character of Santiago's grown daughter was not such a terrible idea, although she is unnecessary to the story. In the film she is played by Valentina Quinn, Quinn's real-life daughter. And in flashback sequences, Santiago as a handsome young man first casting his net into the sea is played by Quinn's son, Francesco.
But two additional expendable characters hang around mercilessly and make big nuisances of themselves: a young writer called Tom, played by Gary Cole, and his wife, played by the very interesting-looking Patricia Clarkson. She's interesting looking, but Hirson gave her nothing very interesting to say.
And yet the film keeps going back to this lethargic twosome as they sit onshore waiting for the return of the old man, who casts off his little fishing boat about 20 minutes into the film. We should be staying with him, in that boat, following his heroic attempts first to land a giant fish, and then to protect it from sharks and other predators. But we keep going back to land for pointless chats between the married couple.
What is that young author there for? At first it seems he could represent Hemingway as a young man, as the fisherman might be Hemingway as an old one. But no, the filmmakers don't have anything that profound in mind. The writer is there to explain the significance of the story to the audience, on the assumption that we couldn't figure it out for ourselves.
"There's a dignity there that's extraordinary," Tom marvels as he sits in a bar waiting for the old man's return. "Respect," says the bartender. "More important than life! Respect." And so it goes, the two of them, and the writer's wife, offering a running commentary that's totally intrusive.
For the story to take hold, we have to feel like we're in that boat with Santiago, sharing his struggle. It has to be our struggle, too. But when the filmmakers repeatedly abandon him for extraneous scenes, the whole primary conflict of the novella is undercut. The message still comes across, but clumsily and heavy-handedly. Hemingway would not be pleased. No one had to say "Papa, don't preach" to him because that was one vice he avoided.
Quinn does look great, and he gives gruff impact to Santiago's musings. "It is no shame for a man to die the way he has lived," he tells his daughter. And to young Manolo (Alexis Cruz), the boy who is his apprentice, Santiago vows, "There's a fish out there waiting for me," even though it's been 84 days since his last catch.
The story was filmed once before, but with great difficulty. Production started in 1956 but had to be suspended because of the difficulties of shooting at sea. Then, in 1958, John Sturges directed a film version starring Spencer Tracy, whose portrayal of Santiago recalled his Oscar-winning performance decades earlier as the curly-haired fisherman of "Captains Courageous."
Even though the '58 version was not very good - it was entirely too obvious that Tracy was sitting not in the ocean but in a big tank at Warner Bros. Studios - the movie was still more faithful to the letter and spirit of Hemingway than NBC's simple-minded remake is.
The photography of the Virgin Islands is lush, and the early scenes of Santiago on shore work pretty well. But when Santiago puts out to sea, the film starts springing leaks. "Man can be destroyed, but not defeated," he says. The filmmakers can't destroy or defeat Hemingway, but unfortunately, they seem to have tried.
(c) 1990, Washington Post Writers Group