Loading ...An Awkward Adaptation of Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet” - The New Yorker
This past March, at the New York International Children’s Film Festival, Roger Allers, the director of “The Lion King,” cheerfully answered kids’ questions about his newest movie, which had just had its U.S. première. He grinned directly at each young moviegoer who took the microphone: Yes, there aren’t that many animals in the movie, except for the birds. No, we don’t really know what happened to the little girl’s dad, we just know he’s gone and that’s why she doesn’t talk much. The movie is called “Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet,” and it opens in New York and Los Angeles on August 7th, with showings in other cities to follow. When someone in the audience asked Allers about his experience with the book that the film is based on, the goateed baby-boomer in shirtsleeves let his gaze float into the middle distance and assumed a thoughtful tone.
“I was given a copy of the book when I was in college, and I had an experience of … satori, an enlightenment sort of thing. And then later, I spent some time on Crete…” He trailed off, perhaps noticing that the theatre was full of Manhattan preteens (and their parents), for whom “satori” and “Crete” might as well have been Klingon, presumably. He was a man alone, signalling from across a vast generation gap. “It sounds ridiculous to talk about here,” he said, “but it was … very meaningful for me.”
Allers was not really alone: Kahlil Gibran’s illustrated book of poems, organized in twenty-six sections and offering enigmatic wisdom—“On Love,” “On Marriage, “On Religion,” “On Money”—has been enormously popular since it was first published in 1923. It earned a special reputation in the nineteen-sixties and seventies as a spiritual text, the “counterculture Bible.” Couples read aloud from the book at barefoot weddings (“Love one another but make not a bond of love, let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls”). It was given as a gift at graduations, birthdays, funerals. The small volume is said to have sold upwards of a hundred million copies—in paperback, hardcover, leather-bound, day-planner, Christmas-tree-ornament, and special military editions—in forty different languages. An animated film is probably the one form that the book hadn’t taken.
It might not have taken that form were it not for the actress Salma Hayek, who produced the film. “The Prophet” was very meaningful to her, too, but in an entirely different way. It wasn’t about enlightenment, she told Variety, but about her Lebanese grandfather: “To me, when I see the cover, I cannot think of anyone else but him.”
Many Americans of Allers’s generation who have read, given, or recited “The Prophet” ’s words likely do not know, or at least do not care, that its long-dead author, Kahlil Gibran, was born in what is now Lebanon. (His home in Besharri was, at the time of his immigration to the United States, still part of Greater Syria in the Ottoman Empire. Gibran died in New York City, in 1931, at the age of forty-eight, of cirrhosis of the liver.) Many of the teen-agers and college-age young people who discover the book may prefer to see it as a timeless guide to existential questions, like a Ouija board or the “I Ching.” Attaching this amorphous wisdom to a specific author, with his inevitable human foibles, would just be a buzzkill.
Nevertheless, Lebanese and Arab-American advocates for Gibran have long sought to enhance his literary and cultural reputation, as Joan Acocella described, in The New Yorker, in 2008. Gibran was a Maronite Christian by heritage but a vocal critic of Muslim-Christian sectarianism; he fantasized about building a church with a minaret on top in his home country.
In 1985, the Kahlil Gibran Centennial Foundation succeeded in getting Congressional approval to build a Gibran memorial garden on federal land in Washington, D.C. But by then it seemed as though an entire generation had grown out of the book at once. The Washington Post literary critic Jonathan Yardley railed against the project as an embarrassing waste of money, calling “The Prophet” “pure gibberish” and its author the “patron saint of calendar and greeting-card copywriters.”
The movie probably has little shot at winning over such readers. But new young people arrive every day, and the book continues to find readers who are not dissuaded—and may even be encouraged—by its dismissal by critics. There are also some baby boomers who continue to have fond feelings about their counterculture Bible. Hayek and her fellow producers seem to be giving a nod to those readers with their selection of material from the book: they could only fit animations of eight of the book’s twenty-six short poetic sections into the film (each section is designed by a different animator), but they made sure all the most frequently quoted verses were included. If you’re listening for “Make not a bond of love,” or “Your children are not your children, they are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself,” or “Work is love made visible,” you will hear it.
But you may be surprised by what surrounds the familiar words. Since the book itself doesn’t really have a plot, the filmmakers decided to create one in order to link together the different poems. That larger plot is about a rebellious young girl and her struggling, widowed mother (voiced by Salma Hayek), whose accidental encounter with a poet called Mustafa (voiced by Liam Neeson and loosely based on Gibran), changes their lives for the better. The setting of the story, as in the book, has mostly been blurred of distinguishing details, and the people have the rounded, two-dimensional features of old-fashioned Disney animation. But the hapless soldiers who guard the mountain cabin where the poet is under some kind of house arrest wear fezzes and refer to someone called a “pasha,” which makes them seem like Ottoman-era Turks. The mountain country looks vaguely like a cartoon Lebanon.
The story line takes place on the day of Mustafa’s release, and so the soldiers usher him back down from the mountain to the sea, where he will return by ship to his unnamed homeland. At every step he encounters something that inspires a poem—a family celebrating a wedding, a person selling food, a lively debate, and so on. Abruptly, each time, the narrative stops, and a new swirl of imagery appears—in watercolor, or Claymation, or a wash of finger paint—often with background music that makes the words, in a rather hurried voiceover, seem incidental.
Inviting animators with styles that differ wildly both from one another and from the visual style of the main story line, could, I suppose, serve as a tribute to the book’s long history and varied interpretations. But the animations start to feel repetitive as the movie progresses; each bit of poetry interrupts the story in the same way. Most of the animated sections involve a natural element—trees, birds, human hands, babies, water—repeated and abstracted in various patterns. Meanwhile, in order for the larger plot to have any emotional payoff, we must, with each poem, grow more and more fond of Mustafa, the imagined author of these poems, so that we care when (spoiler alert!) he does not get to go free. But the abstract animations don’t help forge this bond—and the sometimes clumsy dialogue in the narrative portions doesn’t help, either. (A military official says that Mustafa’s writings offer “nothing less than a call to rebellion,” and sentences him to death. “I am a criminal,” he whispers to the young girl from his cell. “My crime? Poetry!”)
The movie’s juxtaposition of poetry and drama makes for an oddly jarring viewing experience, as if a Lebanese grandfather were lecturing a satori-seeking college student. But it may also be a fairly accurate dramatization of the strange cultural space that “The Prophet” occupies, poised awkwardly between utmost seriousness and sheer whimsy. The book is a best-seller with a largely forgotten author; it was written for adults, but has been adopted by teen-agers; it is dismissed as lightweight, but remains dogged in its longevity. It even produces conflicting reactions in its fans, people like Allers, who seem both nostalgic for and possibly embarrassed by how the book made them feel. “The Prophet,” as this odd adaptation helps to demonstrate, may be both “very meaningful” and too ridiculous to talk about.
Source: www.newyorker.com