On screen, the writer and director can get you into less restricted territory. On the page, Tolstoy’s limitation is you. But in your head there might be no Pierre Bezhukov except the dolt you see in the mirror, and over him you will always cast a gloss, usually by imagining you are really the broodingly taciturn Andrei Bolkonsky. Tolstoy’s gift is to draw upon what’s already in your head. If they can get that aspect right, the screen can be filled with closeup scenes that will be better than you can imagine. He was also concerned with the psychology of his principal characters, and your screenwriter, director and production staff have to do something about that: principally, one hopes, by not making a nonsense of the casting. Sweeping scope, however, is only the second biggest thing that Tolstoy was offering. But nowadays the CGI tricks can do an even better job of filling the screen to the horizon, and Bondarchuk’s ball scenes, teeming with costumes donated by all the museums of Russia, can be matched even in the eyes of those of us who saw his movie back there, at the height of the cold war, and thought: hell, they might win. The lavishness out-lavished King Vidor’s 1956 American-Italian version, thus fulfilling the political aim: it was the Soviet reply in a cultural exchange of missiles with the west. In the 1967, state-funded, Soviet film version directed by Sergei Bondarchuk, the armies were played by the Red Army, plus 900 horses borrowed from the Ministry of Agriculture. Lily James as Natasha in the BBC adaptation. And sometimes they can add a dimension to the studies of character, even though they always subtract a dimension from the battlefield spectacle, no matter how much they spend.
So why bother with the screen adaptations at all? Well, there’s the sheer fun of watching thousands of clever people pouring millions into doing the impossible. As Isaac Babel said, if the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy. Despite the heaps of evidence that Tolstoy was in reality half crackers, you would swear from the pages of War And Peace that he was God’s stenographer. On a shelf near where I sit writing this, there are half a dozen different editions of the book, and I’ve been reading one or other of them for half my life. It really is that good: good enough to get involved with again, even if it’s the last thing you do. At my age, I doubt that I’ll live to see the next attempt, but I’m definitely thinking about reading the book one more time. T he BBC’s lavish, sexy, heart-rending, head-spinning and generally not-half-bad adaptation of Tolstoy’s vast novel War And Peace finished last weekend, so this weekend there is nothing to do except discuss whether Natasha was credible when she fell so suddenly for the odious Anatole Kuragin, and to start waiting until someone adapts it again.
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