“A Woman's Point of View”: Dialogue and Perspective in Alex Ross Perry's <em>Listen Up Philip</em>

Abstract

Philip Roth's novels have reputation for being unfilmable.1 Only handful of adaptations have been made his impressive body of work, yet these have yielded mixed results and never quite seem to work as well screen as the written page. Perhaps the most egregious case in point is Ernest Lehman's 1972 Portnoy's Complaint, in which the book's subversive mischievousness is reduced to series of shouting matches and missed gags. Even relatively straight like Robert Benton's 2003 The Human Stain replaces Roth's fierce attack political correctness with staid melodrama. The issue, however, is not the films' fidelity to their source novels. As Robert Stam points out, the notion of literal fidelity is highly problematic. Not only does it carry moral overtones suggesting that cinema is necessarily secondary and derivative vis-a-vis literature,2 but it also assumes that the novel contains an extractable essence, a kernel of meaning or nucleus of events that can be 'delivered' by an adaptation (Beyond Fidelity 57). An adaptation, he argues, is rather like translation, which suggests that any text can produce an infinity of different readings.3 Nonetheless, in the case of Roth adaptations, something appears to be lost in translation. Roth's books derive much of their power not plot but their vivid voices and their exploration of the characters' inner lives. Most of the adaptations, however, have failed to express these elements in successful manner. As Ira Nadel puts it, (or individual directors) seems to be unable to shift the rhetorical resources found in Roth to the screen, making it difficult to capture the self-conscious narrative style of Roth's best (53). Alex Ross Perry's Listen Up Philip, released in 2014, is not strict of Philip Roth, yet it draws many elements his oeuvre and weaves them into the film. In doing so, Perry opens up dialogue with Roth, and the film as both playful homage to and critical reconsideration of his work. This approach is in itself tribute to Roth and the dialogical dimension of his fiction, and may best explain how the film manages to capture his writing more effectively than any other so far.Linda Hutcheon defines adaptations as deliberate, announced, and extended revisitations of prior works (xiv). Listen Up Philip does not acknowledge its relation to Philip Roth's novels in legal sense. There is no based on or adapted from disclaimer. From the outset, however, many visual clues abound. The title uses the same font that is featured prominently the cover of the first edition of Portnoy's Complaint as well as other Roth novels of the 1970s. The title card and closing credits use yellow color that is reminiscent of the background color of the same edition. And of course, the titular character and Roth share the same first name.More conspicuously, Perry borrows part of the plot of The Ghost Writer. The main character, Philip (played by Jason Schwartzman), is young Jewish author the verge of success. He is about to publish his second novel, the cryptically titled Obidant. Leaving his girlfriend Ashley Kane (Elizabeth Moss) behind in New York, he decides to accept the invitation of his literary idol, the renowned author Ike Zimmerman (Jonathan Pryce), to spend the summer at his residence upstate. There, in lieu of the elusive Amy Bellette, he finds Zimmerman's daughter Melanie (Krysten Ritter). Zimmerman is reflection of E. I. Lonoff in The Ghost Writer but also of Zuckerman in the American trilogy and, to certain extent, of Roth himself.4 Zimmerman's house in the woods is similar to Lonoff 's clapboard farmhouse (Ghost 3) and Zuckerman's two-room cabin (Stain 36) in the Berkshires. Like them, Zimmerman has renounced the clamor of the city: You can't get anything done here. It has creative energy, but not productive energy. Zimmerman's name, echoing Zuckerman's, means carpenter (literally room man) in German, which further associates him with seclusion. …