When somebody puts one of your favorite fictional worlds on the screen for the first time, you’re never sure whether you’re going to be glad or sorry. (I’m still not sure how I feel about Peter Jackson’s LOTR.)
But Adam Beach and Wes Studi were perfect as Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn. It’s been a long time since I read Tony Hillerman’s Skinwalkers, so I don’t know how true it was to the details, but the feel of it was right. Even if Chee seemed to have the advantage over the Legendary Lieutenant Leaphorn for most of the movie, instead of being in awe of him.
What was strange to me, but only at first, were the laptops and cell phones. Hillerman’s been writing these books for a long time, and Skinwalkers was written in a pre-Internet world. When they made the movie, they decided to set it in the here and now, and I think that was a good decision. It was kinda fun to see Leaphorn pulling up sites about skinwalkers from the Web.
There was only one detail that they missed that they should have included. Toward the end, for the first time, we see Leaphorn in his office. Fans of the Hillerman books know that Leaphorn has almost a fetish about his map of the Navajo reservation, covered with color-coded push-pins showing where different crimes and other suspicious activities have taken place, helping him see patterns of criminal activity. While it didn’t come into play in this one, it wouldn’t have cost them more than a second or two to pan across such a map before getting back to business, so to speak.
But that’s nitpicky. I liked it. Redford & Co. got the feel of Hillerman’s world absolutely right. I’m ready to go back anytime they care to make another Hillerman movie.
I am not quite as excited as you seem to be, RTFirefly. While I was not discomforted by Chee, I was not happy about the Legendary Lieutenant Leaphorn. He didn’t seem as methodical as Hillerman writes him. He seemed more, I don’t know, an action hero waiting to happen. To me that quality of waitfulness that Leaphorn typifies was not there and it needed to be.
I suppose that is extremely hard to protray on screen though, and I should be happy the plot was relatively closely followed.
You are right though, the map and push pins would have been a nice touch.
I’m glad you started this thread, RT. I was gonna start one myself last night.
I’m a huge Hillerman fan, and was excited about this show, but I have to say I was not happy with the tv adaptation. I think they got Leaphorn totally wrong. Sure, in the books he’s introspective and not exactly cuddly, but in the show he’s just an ass.
The whole thing was just…slow. They had all these plot points that either made no sense or just went nowhere. What was the point of having Emma have cancer? And the the maybe- psychological-maybe-not effects of Chee having been shot by a bone bead could have been a cool sub-plot, but it got utterly dropped.
And did I miss something, or did they never explain exactly how Dr. Stone got Lonnie’s necklace in his bag? I mean, I got the part about how he blamed the other medicine men for his parent’s tragedy, but I didn’t see where they connected him with Lonnie.
I like Mr. Hillerman’s novels too, but I was disappointed in the PBS version. Too many of the details were changed from the novel(I’ll have to reread it to verify that my impression is correct), and they made detective Leaphorn look totally ignorant of the Navajo lifestyle. He’s also a Navajo! In the novel Jim Chee was explaining the customs to an FBI agent accompanying him, and the explanations are useful for the unintiated, but having Jim Chee explain / translate to Leaphorn made no sense to me.
Emma having cancer - I think it’s supposed to show us the human side of Joe Leaphorn. In the novel he worries quite a bit about his wife (though in the novel she suffers from Alzheimer’s, not cancer.)
Actually, in the novels she ended up having a brain tumor, after Leaphorn thought it was Alzheimer’s. And in the context of the books, it was a very effective way to show Leaphorn’s humanity, but it didn’t really work for the show.
My wife is a huge, huge Hillerman fan; I myself have read only four or five of the novels. We watched about five minutes of the TV adaptation, and she made me turn it off. Any longer and she would have turned into Dr. Smith – “The pain! The pain!”
Basically, she just said it was “wrong. All wrong. Switch it.” Then she didn’t want to talk about it any more.