The Beast Misses Henry James' Point

You’d be hard pressed to find a work of fiction less suitable for adaptation to the screen than Henry James’ 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle. The protagonist, John Marcher, is convinced he’s destined for some profound fate, and so refuses to marry, or do anything with his life. As he nears old age without experiencing any special destiny, he realizes this absence is in fact his providence—he’s wasted his life in anticipation of he knows not what, and his reward is that he’s wasted his life. The Beast in the jungle is not some deadly monster; it’s the realization, which finally leaps upon him, that his existence is pointless and boring.

In short, The Beast in the Jungle is a narrative in which the whole point is that nothing happens. There’s much nuanced ambivalent prose, but there’s not much, or anything, to film.

Director Bertrand Bonello solves this problem in his much-lauded recent adaptation The Beast by radically altering not just the events of James’ story, but his themes and the entire point of the story. The result is a work that underlines just how antithetical, original, and unassimilable James’ novella remains, even in a film that eschews most of Hollywood’s conventional genre markers.

The Beast is set in 2044, when AI controls the world and has taken over most jobs. Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) works at the soul-crushing task of reading the temperature of data cores; in order to get a better position she decides to purify her DNA. This involves a drug-induced, quasi-hypnotic process oddly reminiscent of Jennifer Lopez’s The Cell, in which Gabrielle wears a skin-tight outfit, submerges in liquid, and then regresses to past lives to locate moments of intense emotion. When she’s done, she’s supposed to have escaped her baser passions, so that she can make rational decisions un-swayed by excessive emotion.

The first life Gabrielle reexperiences finds her in Paris in 1910; she’s a successful pianist married to a doll manufacturer, but tempted to infidelity by an old friend, Louis (George MacKay). After that romance ends badly and bloodily, she whooshes up to 2014, where she’s an aspiring model/actor in LA and Louis is a violent misogynist incel. That doesn’t go well either.

Maybe it can all be fixed in the present of 2044 when Gabrielle and Louis find each other in a mysteriously empty night club? Well, after 2 ½ hours, you’ve probably figured out that this isn’t one of those happily-ever-after films.

It is, though, a ravishingly, self-consciously, and insistently beautiful film. Bonello’s compositions in whatever period are sumptuous, and his camera lingers on each scene—and especially on Seydoux’s endless procession of flattering outfits, and on her face in various stages of pensiveness and mourning. The repetition of these static moments of beauty is echoed in the Lynchian return and re-return of lines of dialogue and ominous symbols—a pigeon flying into various homes, bodies floating in water, words which seem irrelevant or confused in 1910 which suddenly take on weight and meaning in 2014, or 2044.

The film’s filled with ravishing portents because Gabrielle does have a destiny, and a great love. It’s true that that love is thwarted by circumstance—and/or, by the increasing alienated isolation and dehumanization of modernity. But that just means hers is a sweeping tragedy rather than a sweeping triumph. It’s a big, cinematic story, with outsized emotions and outsized meaning. Fortune tellers, pigeons, and the film itself believe Gabrielle’s at the center of at least some universe. She matters, and her tragedy tells us something true and powerful about the sweep of history and the human heart. That’s the magic of the movies.

Again, though, what’s striking is how completely at odds this is with James’ novella. John Marcher doesn’t tell us something true and powerful about the sweep of history and the human heart because he’s deliberately removed himself from the first and walled himself off from the second. Gabrielle has a premonition that something terrible will happen to her—and it does happen to her, repeatedly. Marcher believes that he has a great destiny, but he doesn’t. His destiny’s nothing. He’s not a big screen character, a small man, reaching the end of his arid story, in which there’s no catharsis, no victory, no tragedy. He isn’t larger than life. His story is as small and pointless as yours or mine, or as that of anyone’s who doesn’t get a movie made about them.

Even in an era when motion picture technology has been democratized via camera and cell phone, big screen films are still big. They have large budgets (7.5 million euros for The Beast); they involve lots of workers—camerapeople, special effects people, hair stylists, makeup artists, costume designers, actors. When you put that much capital and coordination into a story, it’s bound to feel like the story is important.

Henry James, in contrast, sat down by himself, with just a page and a pen, and wrote about how one guy unwittingly embraced his irrelevance. I’m not saying a movie could never under any circumstances find a way to do that. But for better or worse, this one didn’t.