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Great Book, Bad MovieHow Hollywood ruins novels.

By Willing DavidsonPosted Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2009, at 2:04 PM ET

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Then I saw Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, which the Criterion Collection has recently re-released. Director Paul Schrader—who had grown up in a strict Calvinist household, been mentored by Pauline Kael, written Taxi Driver, and directed American Gigolo—used the life and work of Yukio Mishima to make his masterpiece.

Mishima was Japan's most famous writer in the 1950s and '60s. Obsessed with the restoration of Japan's imperial and martial glory, Mishima believed that young men should glorify their bodies through weightlifting and military exercise and then, perhaps, commit ritual suicide at the height of their beauty. It was a highly eroticized vision, but Mishima was indulged because of his fame and because he offered a way for the Japanese to reclaim their dignity after their postwar privations. In fact, Mishima was allowed to maintain his own private militia, an indulgence that backfired when he and some of his cadets took over the local army garrison, tied up the commanding officer, and gathered all the soldiers in front of the building, where Mishima gave a poorly received speech exhorting the military to return the emperor to his rightful glory. Mishima then went inside and committed seppuku.

That's a lot of plot for one movie, and yet Schrader complicates it. He tells the story of that day, and of Mishima's prior life and career, but he also throws in three of Mishima's novels: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kyoko's House, and Runaway Horses. And yet, where one would expect muddle, there's a weird clarity. Schrader's only option—self-imposed—is not to respect the plot. Mishima believed that there were some things that art couldn't express and some things that action couldn't. The pen and the sword have their own capabilities. Similarly, Schrader uses a combination of literary and visual vocabularies to indicate that books and movies play by different rules.

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion follows a stuttering Buddhist acolyte who both reveres and detests the beauty of the temple where he studies; eventually, he burns it down. Schrader sets this story in a highly stylized stage set. Every prop shrinks around the actors. The three levels of the temple add up to about 10 feet, and the path that leads to it is an assembly of wooden slats on a painted floor. On the ceiling and walls a thick golden coat of sky is interrupted by flat green vegetation. In almost every frame of the scene we see at least three boundaries. This is a novel, Schrader's saying: a formal, artificial space in which characters move about for our edification.

The novel is an attempt to express life, typically a mimetic attempt. But there's no naturalism in the novel. Writing down what actually happens, what's actually said, would be boring and read as fake. The novel is a hermetic system, with formal rules, that tries to express or comment on something outside itself. Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road believes that what is said in a novel represents some kind of truth that actors can play. But Schrader's treatment of the novels in Mishima is more open-eyed. They're set apart, self-contained, and yet miniature worlds are there within. They take place on a stage within a limited room, and yet we enter a life as fully realized as the more documentary parts of the movie, that are supposedly "about" Mishima.

So much for theory. Mishima is an achingly pleasurable movie, a formal work of art that offers visceral pleasures: From the shots of the writer's ridiculously baroque house at the beginning of the film to the blazing red sun that ends it, Schrader works with a wide palette of colors and settings that string the viewer along from scene to scene. This is the luxury of film, that it can cohere a narrative through color or even through technical devices such as panning and focus.

Yet Revolutionary Road uses the medium of film to very little effect. Perhaps if Mendes had concentrated more on the mood and tone of the book instead of styling it like a two-hour episode of Mad Men, the movie could be viewed as something more than a chance for slow readers to imbibe a classic.