Empire Falls: novel + miniseries

I.

One of the occupational hazards of being a Victorianist is the propensity for finding analogies between contemporary novels and their nineteenth-century ancestors.  And thus, it should hardly come as a shock that Richard Russo's Empire Falls (2001) immediately reminded me of W. M. Thackeray's Vanity Fair.  Like that most astringent of Victorian baggy monsters, the rather more concise Empire Falls dwells deep in the realm of utter disappointment: characters repeatedly discover that the most intensely desired objects of their affection, whether financial or physical, prove sadly unworthy.  When protagonist Miles Roby's ex-wife, Janine, thinks to herself, "But damn, she'd hoped to get farther up than this" (279), she refers to both her seat at the football game and her seat at the game of life--an echo of Miles' own inability to climb high enough to paint the church steeple.  Even history itself is one long run of let-downs and betrayals; the locals' collective nostalgia for Empire Falls' bustling past, which baffles Miles, is badly undermined by their universally unhappy individual memories of spousal abuse (physical and psychological), emotional abandonment, and terrible home lives.   Although the death of Miles' primary oppressor, the icy Mrs. Whiting, provides some hope for the future, it's nevertheless the case that even the prospect of financial renewal will do little for the town's residents, and Miles himself never gets around to buying that alluring bookstore in Martha's Vineyard.  In the end, as in the beginning, utopia lies outside the town's borders--although even there, one suspects, disappointment awaits.

Mrs. Whiting's mantra is "power and control" (249), a mantra the novel repeatedly associates with moral deformity.  The novel's central symbol, of course, is the river, which Mrs. Whiting's husband Charles ("C.B.") diverts in order to keep the trash away from his new home's shore; as it turns out, C. B. Whiting's control over the river proves only temporary, and it ultimately returns to its original path with devastating force.  There are other painful returns home in the novel, ranging from Miles' return home from college, to the emotionally and physically disabled Cindy Whiting's return to her mother's home, to C. B. Whiting's return to his wife; coming home frequently results in suffering (and, in C. B.'s case, suicide), not joyous reunion or spiritual wholeness.  But that's because the original departures themselves resulted from troublesome diversions, most of them stemming from Mrs. Whiting's vengeance against Miles' mother, Grace, who commits adultery with C. B. and contemplates running away with him.  Not all abuses of power lie directly at Mrs. Whiting's feet; the novel also indicts the cruelty of Father Tom, whose demand that Grace ask Mrs. Whiting's forgiveness sets off the events that follow, and the cruelty of adolescents, who viciously attack at the first sign of weakness or simply difference.  (The novel's vision of teenage culture, whether in the 1970s or the 2000s, is definitely red in tooth and claw.)  The most brutal return, though, belongs to the abused and abandoned teenager, John Voss, whose apparently senseless shooting rampage at the high school prefigures the deadly flood that ends the novel. 

Despite the grimness, the novel is, in fact, very funny--rather funnier, I think, than Straight Man.  Thackeray would have approved of Russo's sense of irony, whether it's applied to the Whiting family woes ("Honus wanted his son to be prepared for the inevitable day when he, too, would lose his marbles and assault Charles' mother with whatever weapon came to hand" [5]) or Janine's husband-to-be, Walt ("He always drank her in with what seemed to be fresh eyes, and she didn't really care if the reason for this might be short-term memory deficiency" [69]).  Not to mention a Cat from Hell--perhaps a direct descendant, as I suggested a couple of weeks ago, from Bleak House's vicious Lady Jane.

II.

Russo also wrote the script for the HBO miniseries version of Empire Falls, which perhaps goes to show that even the author may not be the best judge of what to include and what to cut.  The miniseries' first half, which largely consists of Miles Roby feeling put upon, is painfully turgid, but the pacing improves considerably in the second two hours.  Because Russo eliminates many of the characters' histories--that Miles went to school with the high school's principal and art teacher, for example--the narrative loses much of its texture; part of Empire Falls' attraction and repulsion, after all, is that everybody is painfully familiar with everybody else.   More puzzlingly, it's no longer clear why it's important that Miles is Catholic.  Granted, the novel's Miles is hardly the sort of Catholic to warm the cockles of Fr. Neuhaus' heart, and the narrative generally is not sympathetic to Catholicism in its more conservative/orthodox mode, but Grace's and Miles' faith--and his eventual dissatisfaction with it--is integral to the plot.  In the miniseries, Miles' real interest in the church doesn't appear to extend beyond the symbolism of painting the steeple.

The casting, too, is as off-and-on as the frequently-remarked Maine accents.  On the plus side, I number Danielle Panabaker as Miles' teenage daughter, Tick; Paul Newman as Miles' ne'er-do-well father, Max; and Joanne Woodward as a very chilly Mrs. Whiting.  On the negative side, there's Helen Hunt's starkly painted Janine.  And then there are the problems with actors who simply don't fit into their characters' bodies. 

We're all familiar with complaints that an actor "doesn't look like" what the novelist intended, but there's more at issue than just this betrayal of a fond memory: in narratives, bodies signify.  It's not that bodies necessarily offer indexical maps to characters' purported "inner natures" (as is often proposed, or at least wished for, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction), but that they frequently suggest how a character lives with himself and others--or, perhaps, how a character intentionally or inadvertently lives as someone else.  Miles Roby, for example, is supposed to be a rather heavy man, who spends too much time munching on leftovers from his restaurant; the rangy Ed Harris, already having a hard time tamping down his personality, is simply too pointed--even if he does make a good physical match to Paul Newman.  (Another blogger suggests that Harris is just too "casually virile," which seems accurate.)  Dennis Farina is even more off as Janine's paramour, Walt Comeau.  While Walt doesn't have to bear a strong resemblance to, say, Leslie Jordan, he's supposed to be a short, albeit muscular, guy--a farcical, bulked-up echo of the equally short C. B. Whiting, who cuckolded Miles' father just as Walt cuckolds Miles.   More to the point, Walt is a sixty-year-old who convincingly poses as a fifty-year-old and, as he likes to brag, has the physique of an extremely well-built forty-year-old, whereas Farina is a sixty-odd-year-old with, um, the body of a sixty-odd-year-old; even with a trimmer midriff than usual, Farina cannot pass for much younger than he actually is.  As a result, Janine's attraction to Walt seems actively delusional, not the novel's dream (even the admittedly tainted, simplistic dream) of a better, truly romantic life.