JPod, re the book and the film: you’re right that Lady James is not the go-to gal for action sequences, which means the chase half of the novel is somewhat stiff. But I’d rather have that problem than the movie’s, which falls back on ancient clichés about the coolness of hippies, etc, and thus undermines or fails to grasp the central idea of the book, and the reason the hotshot set designers cooked up that fabulous dystopian England you love so much.
And at the risk of generalizing, isn’t that the big problem with Hollywood today? That it’s got better and better at saying nothing? I’d rather have P.D. James’ problem than that of her adaptors.