A Thick Red Morass

Rating: 1/10 (8 August 1999)

Maybe it's MY fault. I finished the book, coincidentally, about a week before I found out the movie was being made. The book is perhaps the most stunning evocation of life during wartime I have ever read, and of course when one thinks James Jones film adaptations the first thing that springs to mind is From Here to Eternity. So, really, this movie did have a lot of space to fill in the shoes of James Jones and Monty Clift. And this job it did was horribly, preposterously, unbelievably, undeniably, unaccountably BAD. To be fair-- the trailers were excellent. And it seemed to me that the movie was begging for another three hours, so perhaps as a six-hour film it would have been brilliant. The acting was certainly top-notch in many cases; that is, when the actors were onscreen long enough to act (viz. George Clooney). But as the jumbled, unstable mess it was, it was just awful. Whole huge sections of central importance to the book disappeared; whole sections not a part of the book at all were added. James Jones is tapdancing with rage in his grave over the thorough mess made of what may well be his finest book. Read it. Avoid this morass of boredom like the plague.