In the art-free future-world of Ramin Bahrani’s “Fahrenheit 451,“ there are only three acceptable books: the Bible, “To the Lighthouse,” and “Moby-Dick.” These texts have been uploaded to “The Nine,” a ubiquitous future-web and all-swaddling social mediasphere that permeates every aspect of life. All other books, according to Fire Captain Beatty (Michael Shannon) “will make you sick, crazy.” Why the Book of Revelations or a demented metaphorical whale hunt are considered safe but Dostoevsky, Proust, and Morrison must burn is never quite explained.
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There’s a lot left out in this noisy and luridly shot but thin adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s novel. A prescient fable about the death of the imagination and individuality in the postwar war, it imagines a world where the houses have all been fireproofed and firemen race through nighttime streets looking for books to burn. The protagonist Montag (Michael B. Jordan in Bahrani’s take) is a fireman who seemingly doesn’t question the credo outlawing books because they engendered unique thought and confusion, which made people upset. But he starts having problems with his job. One day, Montag goes home, and we discover that he has an entire stash of purloined books; echoes of a different time.
Existing mostly inside Montag’s head, it’s a devilishly tough text to visualize on screen, the outside world painted in vivid but none-too-specific impressionistic sweeps by Bradbury’s rich, vaulting language. When Francois Truffaut gave it a shot in 1966, he went for an arch and icy tone whose peculiarity didn’t much capture the book (Bradbury being too much of a red-blooded humanist) but had an oddball Cubist charm to it. Much like Ava DuVernay‘s lackluster “Wrinkle in Time,” Bahrani, who co-wrote the screenplay with Amir Naderi, doesn’t so much try to put his own spin on the book as he works to compensate for its ruminative nature.
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Bahrani keeps the “Fahrenheit 451” story much the same, excepting the erasure of Montag’s TV-catatonic wife and the bombers flying overhead that presage a faraway war coming home. (The latter is a curious change, as it would have feed into Bahrani’s War on Terror nativism critique.) Montag is still enticed by an underground rebel, this time gloomy pixie book girl Clarisse (Sofia Boutella), to keep questioning the purpose of his job. Their selection for a bonding book is “Notes from Underground,” another of the slew of 19th and 20th century classics we see burned (apparently all the pulp fiction and true-crime mass markets were burned long before, so they can’t secretly read Stephen King or “50 Shades of Grey,” a braver movie about the importance of art might have had fun with that).
To amp up the demanding father-striving son dynamic between Beatty and Jordan, Bahrani makes them a kind of cop buddy movie pair, high-fiving on the job and having a friendly boxing match in front of their fire company. They also compete for the attention of Clarisse, who sells out fellow book-lovers to Beatty even while suggesting an escape route for the disaffected Montag. Strangely for a director whose earlier work like “Goodbye Solo” has been pretty deft and underplayed, he also packs the screenplay with dialogue so simplistic that it kills the tone right from the start. This doesn’t give Shannon and Jordan (consistently two of the most enjoyable actors out there) much to play with. Both respond with moody and energetic but ultimately shallow performances.
This becomes more problematic the further Bahrani digs into their dysfunctional surrogate-father-and-son relationship. When we discover that Beatty, due to his advanced rank, has been given some access to the books he claims to despise so much, a shiver of tension enters the movie. That approach yields a few fascinating moments, such as when Beatty demands Montag read out some lines from a captured copy of “Crime and Punishment,” only for Montag to see Beatty silently mouthing the words along with him, his face tortured with regret. But mostly the two men just flail at each other in between raids on people trying to archive and trade “graffiti” (the catch-all term for the books and other cultural phenomena).
Besides its failure to create an engaging dramatic narrative, another great disconnect in “Fahrenheit 451” is the incomplete conception of its future. Bradbury drew his battle lines in sharp relief. Arrayed against the lovers of books and a life of the mind are the media-zombies like Montag’s wife, losing themselves in the TV walls that surround them with immersive action that overwhelms them into passivity.
In Bahrani’s imagining, the book-free world has been re-imagined as post-literate Trumpian security state nightmare. Jingoism is a more prevalent threat, with people incessantly reminded to “See something, say something!” “Natives” are set against “eels,” the latter being law-breaking book readers who have had their fingerprints lasered off and identities erased. Drones, cameras, and chattily invasive Alexa-like home AIs are everywhere. The Nine cheers on the book-burning exploits of firemen Beatty and Montag and helps crowd-source punishment for captured eels.
Nowhere, though, do we see what exactly everybody is doing in this future all the live long day. Bradbury saw mass media like television providing a soporific blanket for the masses once they were freed of exhausting, thought-sparking books. Here, in a callout to “THX-1138,” home AIs gently remind people to take memory-dulling medications. In the few times when the movie looks beyond the triangle of Montag, Beatty, and Clarisse, we see crowds eagerly watching the streaming coverage of the firemen’s exploits. But since music and old movies are also part of the banned media piles—Montag’s stash includes a VHS copy of “Taxi Driver” with the Blockbuster sticker on it—it doesn’t seem like watching books burn would be a sufficient level of bread and circuses to keep the people entertained. [C]