From the archives: Adaptation and interpretation in You Were Never Really Here
When does retelling a story become telling a new story?
This article was originally written in November 2018 for my old blogspot page. I am putting it here unedited from its original publication date, apart from some minor layout changes to make it easier to read on mobile devices.
This article contains spoilers for the film You Were Never Really Here, and the novella of the same name.
I recently fell in love with Lynne Ramsey’s latest film You Were Never Really Here. It’s a beautiful, heartbreaking and often upsetting journey into humanity’s darkness, in which traumatised former marine Joaquin Phoenix is thrust into a deadly conspiracy after being hired to rescue a senator’s daughter.
What surprised me most was that, despite essentially having the plot of a Steven Seagal movie, Ramsey’s direction ends up offering her audience a deeply personal and strikingly atypical take on this classic formula. And one of the key aspects of this is in the emphasis on the common thread of humanity that runs throughout, not the often brutal actions taken therein.
For Ramsey, Joe’s backstory isn’t as important as capturing something about his day to day. The source of his trauma caught in glimpses but never spoken, it doesn’t matter what he bore witness to so much as how he copes with his psychological triggers. The conspiracy that fuels the main narrative arc is given less screen time than the slow death of a single nameless grunt.
This is a film of instances, one that values the humanity of its cast, understands the impact of its violence while rarely choosing to show it. And, as I later learned, it’s an adaptation of someone else’s novella. I felt compelled to read it after finding this out, because something told me, with no context or reasonable justification, that what I just watched couldn’t possibly be what was written down on paper.
And in a certain regard I am right. You Were Never Really Here the Lynne Ramsey film and You Were Never Really Here the novella by Jonathan Ames are so starkly different that they might as well be different stories altogether.
I love to read, but I realised a few years ago that the vast majority of fiction in my back catalogue has a common theme: a predilection for adjectives and verbs. These authors describing in great detail action sequences, or the way their characters look, often without offering any meaningful insight into how they feel or what they think, no reflection on the aftermath of big events. And not to massively generalise but a lot of these works are by male writers.
It’s something I only really started to notice after beginning to explore more introspective works; stories that detail a great distress of the heart, even if nothing of note really ever happens in the plot. It has become something that I have grown to cherish and seek out, this other half of storytelling.
Jonathan Ames is a writer of the former camp, though, and it resulted in me reading a story I was already familiar with, yet found no additional joy in. While I loved Ramsey’s film, Ames’ novella felt like an overly pedantic cliff-notes version of a longer work that doesn’t exist. It revels in detail, in the tools of Joe’s trade, in the terrible deal Senator Votto made to secure his electoral race. In the specifics of how Joe does his job.
It describes the various traumas that made him the man he is, but only briefly, and almost never touched on again, as though they were just things. You saw some dead women, Joe, and now you have PTSD...ah well, time to go to work.
It’s not a bad read by any stretch, and it still centres around the idea that Joe, as competent and skilled as he is, is a fundamentally broken man haunted by decades of trauma. But that is in part a major flaw. It centres around Joe, at the expense of all the other players. Lisa, herself a victim of trauma and a key counterweight to Joe in the film, barely features in the book, nor is she given any agency. She’s basically a package.
The same can be said for Joe’s mother, who is largely described in retrospect, the battered wife more than the weathered parent but in all never an agent of her own autonomy. And as quickly as it begins, the story just...ends. Lisa hasn’t been rescued. Joe hasn’t found vengeance nor redemption. The novella closes with a cheap cliffhanger that left me annoyed more than excited for something to come.
Perhaps this is a phenomenon unique to those who work their way backwards, watching the adaptation before the source material. The comparison is inescapable, but also the question: If I had read the book first, through what eyes would I end up viewing the film? In the case of You Were Never Really Here, does Ramsey’s drastically different retelling of the same story mean that it can’t really be compared as an adaptation, or is this exactly what adaptations should be?
Almost every moment I cherish from the film doesn’t feature at all in the novella:
A quiet moment of brief joy as Joe and his mother sing while polishing silverware.
Joe holding the hand of his mother’s killer as he bleeds to death.
Joe 'burying’ himself with his mother in the lake.
The silent shock of Joe and Lisa sat opposite one another in a diner failing to comprehend the magnitude of what they’ve been forced to endure at the film’s closure.
These moments seek to amplify and give meaning to events that have happened in the story. They are a reflection of happenings that are present across both mediums, but where Ames chose his focus in one direction; Ramsey chose another, and the result was a film that I can’t stop thinking about.
So much of what makes You Were Never Really Here special is held in its director’s voice; held in its lead’s incredible, captivating performance; held in the way it uses sound design to tell part of the story that otherwise would have been left to exposition; held in a bold directorial choice that offers up an idea that sometimes what happened isn’t as important as the fact that it happened.
And I think the takeaway from all this is that we really need to let film makers free to roam the creative possibilities of adapting something without having to accurately trace around the source material.
And for Christ’s sake please, let us have more hour and a half long films!