The recent Steve Carell and Paul Rudd comedy Dinner For Schmucks was, like many Hollywood films, a remake. This time of popular French play-turned-film Dîner de Cons. Although the European original is funnier and overall better than the American version, the initial idea of the remake could possibly be excused, no matter how bad the final cut actually is, as it has been over ten years since the original was released and the new film introduces new characters. So, in this respect the remake is targeting a different audience to the original and is not trying to just copy the film, rather take the central concept and create new ideas around that.
However, there is absolutely no excuse for a foreign-language film that was first shown in cinemas only two years ago, to worldwide critical acclaim, to be remade into a film that looks to emulate the original in nearly every way except that the language is now English. It therefore follows that there is no excuse for the US remake of Swedish vampire flick Let The Right One In; the story of 12 year-old Oskar who shares a small flat with his mother living in a relatively poor area of Stockholm in the mid-80’s, and the friendship he develops with seemingly 12 year-old vampire girl Eli, who moves in next door with her mysterious elderly male carer. Based on a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist (who also wrote the screenplay) and directed by Tomas Alfredson, it is more a study of the loneliness and longing of children on the verge of adolescence than it is about vampires. Though it does also do that very well. The Anglophone rights were quickly snapped up once it started screening at festivals and those quick-thinking American film execs cunningly re-named it Let Me In, the other translation of the novel’s title. Presumably to support the claim made by the remake’s director, Matt Reeves, that he has made a new version of the book rather than just ripping off one of the most innovative horror films of recent times.
Reeves said at the film’s panel discussion at this year’s Comic-Con that he thinks the original is “a masterpiece”. This begs the question: why the hell are you remaking it then? If a work of art is already exceptional, then where is the need for a new version? Especially when it’s still so fresh in the memory. Evidently, in a case like this there is a clear financial gain to be made. As with all Hollywood films, they’re made first and foremost as a business venture, and in business the safest way to make a profit is to give the customer what you know they want. This is why there are so many sequels, remakes and adaptations. It’s much easier for a studio to keep rehashing old stories that they know are already successful than to risk original and untried ideas.
More than that however, remakes like Let Me In smack of Tinsel Town’s desperation to be seen as the world’s leading cinema industry, artistically as well as commercially. Not artistically in the sense of a film that borders on being an art installation like Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait for example. More that, if a foreign-language film has an interesting, commercially profitable idea at it’s heart, yet artfully crafted in a very non-Hollywood style, then the major studios will want to plunder that idea, market it as the USP of their version and then flesh it out with classic Hollywood devices. Take for example, the remake of Wim Wenders’ 1987 film Wings of Desire. Here, the studio has picked-up a beautifully made, ethereal tale about an angel watching over Berlin who desires to feel the full range of human emotions, to see life in colour, and transported it to LA, duly called it City Of Angels, cast Meg Ryan and upped the rom-com factor. It’s the type of commercial dilution of art that Hollywood has always been swimming in.
You can see the attractiveness of Let The Right One In then. As an artistic comment on childhood, it is stunning, emotive and intelligent, and as a vampire story, also has great mass-market potential. Moreover, as Hollywood sees itself as being a leader in vampire movies they would view it as their right to have their piece of this new form of blood-sucking pie and show that they too are capable of making such great cinema. Even if ‘making great cinema’ equates to ‘copying great cinema’, which, in essence, negates the ‘great’ bit. As what is ‘great’ about a like-for-like copy? If a painting by one artist copies an original painting by a different artist then it is labelled a ‘fake’ and discarded as being artistically redundant. If we applied the same rules in the world of cinema then we could call Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of Psycho a ‘fake’. (What would we call Michael Haneke’s English language shot-for shot remake of his own, originally German, Funny Games though? ‘Completely unnecessary’ perhaps?)
Reeves seems acutely aware that if the film is to have any sort of critical merit of its own then it cannot merely be a copy. And he forcibly wants to demonstrate that Let Me In isn’t one right from the get-go by reshuffling the narrative structure of events. It’s a desperate appeal to the audience of the original for their approval. ‘Hey, look, I haven’t just ripped it off! I changed it around a bit. I’m not a copy-cat after all! I’ve got my own ideas!’ It is also ultimately an insubstantial appeal because playing with the scene sequences doesn’t differentiate it from Let The Right One In that much when all the costumes, characters and locations in those scenes have been specifically chosen to resemble the original as closely as possible. Plus, it has then been shot in a way that tries to replicate the atmosphere that fills the original.
However, although the filmmakers want to recreate the Swedish film as closely as they can get away with, they don’t appear overly fond of the subtlety that made LTROI so interesting. So, they’ve crudely crowbarred in some Hollywood horror clichés to spell-out what’s going on to the audience. For example, the soundtrack is instantly recognisable as being for a horror film, whereas the original goes without one completely. The murderer wears a bag over his head to give him the look of a classic slasher serial killer. And, typically American, an unnecessary religious subtext is also added via the character of the mother. These are used to tell the audience that they should be scared, that they are watching a horror film. Let The Right One In didn’t do that because it couldn’t easily be classed as a horror film. It was far more than that, and that’s where Let Me In falls short.
In terms of the acting, Kodi Smit Mcphee deserves applause for his portrayal of Owen, the new version of Oskar. It’s not his fault that the film he’s in doesn’t deserve to exist. In contrast, Chloe Moretz who plays Aby, the American Eli, is too annoying to be able to portray the nuances of the character in the way that Lina Leandersson did in the original. Moretz was the worst thing in (500) Days of Summer and Kick-Ass. Her on-screen presence is incredibly grating in all her films. Just because she drops the c-bomb in the comic book movie doesn’t make her anymore edgy, or any less precocious than your normal Hollywood brat.
It must be said though, to be fair to Reeves, taken on it’s own, it is a very well directed film. He has tried a few different tricks, some which work: playing with the narrative structure; never showing the mother’s face, always keeping her on the edge of the frame to depict her as never being fully involved in her son’s life. And some that don’t: the highly unoriginal introduction of a lone cop investigating the case. Yet it is damned, for overall it essentially just aspires to be Alfredson’s film for an English-speaking audience who can’t be bothered with subtitles. There is absolutely no need for this film. Furthermore, Reeves’ shaky assertion that he’s making a different version of the novel, rather than remaking the film is violently tested as soon as the credits declare that it’s ‘based on the novel and the screenplay’ (Italics my own). This was blatantly never true anyway because the studio only bought the rights after watching Let The Right One In and it is highly doubtful they had even heard of the book before that. More importantly though, their denial that they have remade the movie demonstrates that filmmakers know that there is an intrinsic wrongness in remaking a film that they don’t think exists when filming a book. So why is that?
Well, the major, obvious difference between remaking a film, and filming a novel is that in the former case the same medium is being used and therefore falls under the same rules and can be judged in the same way. Whereas, in the latter case the original piece (the novel) is being transferred to a new medium and therefore falls under a different set of rules, so the adaptation (the film) cannot be judged in the same way as the original book. A film of a book must be a viewed as a stand-alone piece and be judged separately from any connections to the book. It must be judged only as piece of cinema. Film works in a vastly different, more narrow space than the novel and so any filmmakers adapting a novel should be free to take what they deem to be the essential elements of the story and then use the language of cinema to reform them. So it is always highly unfair when angry readers decry filmmakers for removing some of their favourite subplots of a book from the film version, or for not recreating locations exactly as they were in the reader’s head.
On the other hand, when remaking a film, a director is using the same language as the original and is therefore already tied more closely to the source material than they would be if they were filming a novel. Therefore they will have to change more essential elements if they want to make a legitimately worthwhile remake. Let Me In doesn’t do this. It’s gone out of it’s way to make locations and costumes that look the same, use the same dialogue, same scenes as Let The Right One In, with a few minor differences to warn off critics saying it’s an outright rip-off. Indeed it may be an official rip-off, but a rip-off it still is. Though Lindqvist may be happy that his pockets are getting deeper, Alfredson must be a bit pissed off that his great work has now been overshadowed in the wider public consciousness by a film that is essentially a ‘wanna-be’.
Remakes such as Let Me In typify not only Hollywood’s unimaginative thinking but also the sheer arrogance of the ‘whatever you can do, I can do better’ variety, even though they’re just copying someone else’s work. They want to envelop global cinema so as to be the reigning film industry empire and take foreign films of their liking for their own. They procure any good idea for themselves, Americanise it and dumb it down. It is their inherent American belief that because they have the money to do this, then they have the right. They don’t. Just because something can be done, doesn’t mean it should and Hollywood should learn when to leave a good thing alone. They never will of course if there’s money to be made.
However, sometimes, just sometimes the remake can work if it is sufficiently different enough, and confident enough to have it’s own identity, such as The Magnificent Seven, Hollywood’s take on Kurosawa’s The Seven Samouraï. That film legitimises itself as a remake by ensconcing itself in a very Hollywood genre, the western, exchanging samouraïs for cowboys. Let Me In attempts partly to achieve this contextual transfer, but it feels very half-hearted; a few token clips of Regan speaking on TV are shown in the background of scenes. The overriding sentiment when watching the film is that by setting it at the same time, in a very snowy, not well-off corner of New Mexico, Reeves has gone out of his way to place it in as similar context to the Swedish version as possible. It’s just in America because then everyone can be speaking English.
So, when you hear that David Fincher is shooting his versions of Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy in Sweden, alarm bells start ringing. Sure, the books are so globally successful that Hollywood would have made their versions of the films whether the Swedes had beaten them to it or not. Yet by making them so soon after the Swedish versions and especially by shooting them in Sweden, not relocating to America, they are acting as if the Swedish films didn’t exist. Are they going to go to the same locations as the Swedish films? Is everyone in the films meant to be Swedish but just speaking English? Are they implying that Hollywood can do Swedish better than the Swedish? In which case, it’s the worst type of movie arrogance and imperialism: Hollywood’s desire for world film hegemony, the need to envelope all cinema as American in order to control it as much as possible and therefore reap as much profit from it.
Finally however, it is down to the Anglophone cinema going public to not be so lazy and think that it’s hard work to watch a film with subtitles, because that’s a load of bollocks. Watch fantastic foreign language films, rather than the sanitised American versions. There were a lot of people around the world who did go and watch Let The Right One In but if there were more, then Hollywood wouldn’t bother remaking it. They know they can capitalise on it by remaking it as close as possible to the original without coming under fire for just copying it, and doing it in English. This lack of subtitles in English speaking countries will no doubt reap more financial rewards for Let Me In than the original did, and it’s a very sorry state of affairs.
