After nearly a decade of resistance, knowing that the adaptation could never live up to the source material, I finally decided to watch the 1998 film version of Honore de Balzac's 1888 novel, Cousin Bette.
The closing credits rolled more than an hour ago. I still feel soiled.
The decent acting, passable set design, and workable direction fail to redeem this adapation. The only good thing about director Des McAnuff's version of Cousin Bette is Jessica Lange's excellent turn as Bette, that misunderstood, underestimated old maid hiding her lifelong rage and jealousy beneath a mask of family loyalty.
In all other respects, this adaptation is execrable.
Screenwriters Lynn Siefert and Susan Tarr should be banned from ever penning any more literary adaptations.
Balzac's Cousin Bette was a masterpiece, an eternal condemnation of the selfishness of vice, achieved through a rich and humane, yet brutally honest, portrayal of depravity's destruction of virtue. The cinematic version is a mediocre daytime drama in petticoats.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those literary purists who decries any adaptation straying from the source material. I adored the Scorsese adaptation of Wharton's The Age of Innocence, despite the narrative shortcuts that the limitations of film demanded. I liked the 1999 version of Austen's Mansfield Park, as well as every adaptation of Pride and Prejudice I've seen, including Gurinder Chadha's Bollywood take on the tale. But those adaptations shared one essential quality that Cousin Bette lacks: a faithfulness to the essence of the source material. Cousin Bette, unlike those other adaptations, is not a skillful reinterpretation of an old masterpiece. It is simply a travesty.
The power of the original novel derives from Balzac's use of fascinatingly, unforgettably, tragically human characters to illuminate his pitiless moral: that virtue, nine times out of ten, will fall to the knife in the back of vice. That moral is played out through the characters. And every character, no matter how unbelievably pious or irredeemably immoral, is complex, fascinating, and truly real. From the pure, pious, and eternally forgiving Adeline Hulot, a wife willing to forgive and forget more than two decades of her adored husband's infidelity, all the way down to the Jewish courtesan Josepha, at once a shameless gold-digger, a great artist, and, at heart, a kind woman, every player in Balzac's grand tragedy plays an irreplaceable part and illuminates an unalterable truth. And it is with the writers' treatment of those characters that McAnuff's Cousin Bette first fails.
The greatest tragedy of the novel lies in the gradual abandonment and destruction of the saintly Adeline Hulot. A wife whose gratitude towards the husband who lifted her from a peasant village into the highest ranks of the French aristocracy is so strong that, as mentioned before, she has closed her eyes to two decades of infidelity, she slowly falls from her position into terrible poverty and neglect--one of those illuminations of the destruction of virtue by vice which gives the novel its power. Siefert and Tarr seem not to have grasped this essential point of the source material. Instead of having to deal with the difficulty of a great beauty and great heart thrown into the gutter, they have taken the easy way out by killing her off within the first five minutes of the novel. And this without even bothering to pay lip service to the beauty and charm of the woman whose success is the fuel for the fire of Bette's vengefulness. Without Adeline's presence and influence, Bette's envy is pointless. But what else could one expect from screenwriters this illiterate?
Next, Siefert and Tarr erased the most fascinating character of the original novel, that of Valerie Marneffe, the middle-class civil servant's wife who is the cause of all of the novel's misfortunes. Valerie was a far more fascinating character than her cinematic replacement, the actress and wh*re Jenny Cadine (played rather more horsily than one would hope by Elisabeth Shue). Madame Marneffe's hypocrisy--the truth of her wh*re's heart disguised by the outward appearance of a virtuous wife--and the complications of her avarice and passion, provided a large part of the entertainment and insight of the novel. Again, Siefert and Tarr have avoided the difficulty of bringing such a multifaceted character to life, simply by cutting her out altogether. Shue's Jenny Cadine (the character of Jenny Cadine herself was incredibly minor in the novel, meriting perhaps four or five sentences altogether) is a painfully clumsy amalgamation of three or four far more interesting characters, nothing more than that.
The engine that drives the plot of the original novel, the ruinous competition between the ruined libertine Hector Hulot and the immensely wealthy but equally foolish and ridiculous Celestin Crevel, here renamed Cesar Crevel, for no particular reason, as well as another character, the Brazilian aristocrat Baron Montes de Montejanos, who has also been erased from the movie, is likewise stripped of its power. From watching the movie, one would never get a sense of how or why Hulot thoroughly ruins his family for his mistress, nor how or why Crevel should care enough to lay out even a single franc to defeat his rival. These two old beaus are reduced to mere moneybags, competing in their spending for the favors of a charmless prostitute. Where is Valerie Marneffe's diabolical manipulation of two powers in the interest of her own status and fortune? Elisabeth Shue's Jenny Cadine is neither particularly avaricious nor particularly invested in her own double dealings. Everything Valerie Marneffe did--and she did everything brilliantly--she did to ensure the promotion of her syphilitic husband, which brought her social standing, and to ensure her own private fortune, for which she was willing to knowingly ruin families. Jenny Cadine, on the other hand, seems to live for nothing more than a few bouquets of flowers and a pretty dress or two. Not a fraction as compelling.
So the characters do not live up to the source material. Neither does the plot, which turns Balzac's masterfully arranged actions and reactions topsy-turvy. Here and there, one may see bits of the original novel struggling to break through--as in Bette's rage when she is told that Wenceslas Steinbock, whose life she saved and whom she adores, has secretly entered into a romance with her niece Hortense--but those glimpses are more tragic than anything else, for exposing the greatness that this movie fails miserably to approach.
With a series of seemingly natural and inevitable turns of fortune and struggles to escape ruin, Balzac presented a wholly organic portrait of absolute devastation. Siefert and Tarr hope merely to titillate viewers with an exposed female buttock or breast here and there, some pretty costumes and settings, and a few melodramatic situations forced and laughable. Balzac needed no duels to depict rivalry and hatred; he needed no accidental husband-shootings to bring the full force of marital discord home; he needed no sudden descents into madness to prove the ruinousness of obsession. No one hurled dishes in the novel. No wives were arrested, no sons had to escape from money-lenders promising to "kill your wife and your child" when debts were not paid. Those soap-opera devices weren't necessary in the original novel, because the story itself far surpassed them. But Siefert and Tarr need them merely to dress up an utter narrative failure.
Cousin Bette, the movie, may indeed appeal to some viewers, those who ask for nothing but sub-The Young and the Restless melodrama dressed up in period costumes. For those of us hoping for a bit more than that--perhaps simply a semi-faithful adaptation of one of the greatest works of the Western canon--it is simply best to stay away. I certainly should have.