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Page to Screen by Claire E. Gross Watching David Cunningham’s adaptation of Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising, one has the feeling that, were the characters renamed, no one would ever suspect it had a literary antecedent. Where once was understated atmosphere and delicate plotting, there’s now a long-lost twin trapped in a snow globe; an attempted fratricide; a teenage femme fatale’s PG seduction of the hero Will; and a strobe-lit basement interrogation straight out of a horror flick. Multiple scenes, none of them from the book, uncomfortably recall moments from Lord of the Rings and other recent fantasy blockbusters, A Wrinkle in Time, and even Hitchcock’s The Birds. All of this would seem to suggest to non-readers that Cooper’s Newbery Honor–winning masterpiece is little more than a mishmash of modern fantasy clichés, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. A multifaceted story of learning and awakening, The Dark Is Rising is here reframed as a relatively simple quest, powered mainly by Hollywood flash, to unite the six signs of the Light and thereby definitively drive back the Dark. Where Cooper’s novel conveyed the struggle between Light and Dark in terms of ritual, knowledge, and strength of will, Cunningham amps up the violence and conflates Will’s heroic individuation with his emergence as a “warrior,” a title oft repeated and glorified throughout the movie. As in the book, Will finds joy in the mysterious world he newly inhabits, but rather than delighting in its musical beauty, Cunningham has Will rejoicing in his power, as when he displays a proud little smile after knocking out his older brother. Cooper’s Will displayed an intriguing duality of young and old — the “Old One” surfacing from within the child — both aspects powered by an innate wisdom and uncompromising clarity of purpose that allowed him and Merriman a measure of equality. Aged from eleven to fourteen, burdened with sexual awakening (“I’m supposed to save the world? I can’t even figure out how to talk to a girl”), the movie Will is every inch the archetypal Hollywood boy hero. He’s an outcast (an American in England), a put-upon youngest child, and, less a full-fledged Old One than their tool, a happenstance hero — an underdog in every sense whose rising powers, though certainly gratifying for all those reasons, are difficult to credit. Merriman and the other Old Ones are reduced to static, all-knowing characters, driven by motives far from Will’s and utterly, blindly adult in their use of him. Will’s family also undergoes a drastic makeover. No longer a cheery British haven of clutter and affection, the Stanton home is a seedbed of tension, from the somewhat mean-spirited teasing of brothers James, Paul, and Robin, to the physics professor father’s fidgety distance, to older brother Max’s anxiety over dropping out of college. Cunningham positively skewers Cooper’s bastion of good, depriving Will of a significant source of strength and morality and making him that much more of a lone ranger. While we see clearly the evil that must be fought in the black-pupiled eyes of snarling villains, what exactly must be protected? A bickering, secretive, even cruel family? A well-meaning but manipulative cadre of adults who hand off quests to children? We are at sea. And in discussing the framing of good versus evil, we come to the most egregious alteration of all: the omission of the Walker. In youth a bright-eyed servant of the Light (and Merriman’s liege man, beloved almost as a son), the Walker betrayed the Light after he realized how little his own life meant to Merriman when weighed against the larger struggle. Embittered, he walks the earth for centuries until he can discharge a duty set to him as penance. Aside from greatly humanizing Merriman’s character, the Walker’s storyline is the centerpiece of the book’s examination of betrayal, predestination, responsibility, and the significance of the individual in the face of sweeping conflict. All this, gone. The actors, who do all they can with what they’re given, are the one bright point in the film. Though flatly written, Merriman (Ian McShane) emanates both craggy wisdom and dogged strength, plus as much compassion and respect as McShane can fit between the lines, even when the script works against him. Alexander Ludwig is a worthy Will Stanton, clean-cut and thoughtfully emotive; his transition from a clueless pushover into a hero is skillfully conveyed, and he easily balances innocence, determination, and adrenaline. Most film adaptations fall into two categories: they sacrifice textual details for tonal fidelity or vice versa. A rare few preserve both. The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising manages to retain neither. Had Hollywood’s changes worked, all this comparison would be nothing but purist nitpicking. As it stands, the result is a film that seems written by committee to capitalize on marketing interest groups and recent success stories. It careens from one set piece to the next with minimal character development and even less thematic exploration. Certainly a novel as nuanced, subtle, and internal as Cooper’s would have been a challenge to adapt to film, but those qualities are also what would have made it stand out. Ultimately, the best that can be said of this movie is that it will fade quickly and in so doing discourage as few potential readers as possible from discovering the original.
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