Books, Arts & Manners: Wrong-Note Rag

For once I am in complete agreement with the majority of my colleagues: Ragtime, the movie, does not work, largely because one misses the kaleidoscopic construction of the Doctorow novel. Milos Forman, the director, and Michael Weller, the scenarist, chose what they felt to be the principal strands of this multifarious web: Evelyn Nesbit and the celebrated murder case; Coalhouse Walker Jr., the black musician with his fanatical and fatal quest for justice; Tateh, the impoverished Jewish immigrant who works himself up into a movie director; and the typical turn-ofthe-century American family that gets itself embroiled with all of them.

Some of the many subplots and characters beyond these make all but subliminal appearances (e.g., Houdini), some ended up on the cutting-room floor (e.g., Emma Goldman), and quite a few (e.g., Henry Ford, J. P. Morgan, Dreiser, Freud, Zapata) never even passed their screenplay test. So, instead of freewheeling ragtime, we get a fugue, and a rather unbalanced one at that, with Coalhouse and his vendetta given top priority. A good deal of Doctorow’s irreverent, ahistoric, but politically satiric jocularity bites the dust in the process. But could the filmmakers have stayed faithful to the novel? The printed page can work as a kaleidoscope because the reader takes the shuffling and reshuffling images at his own pace, making his quietus whenever he may choose; but a screen-sized kaleidoscope shimmying around relentlessly for several hours would leave audiences dizzy and confused—if it did not just make them leave, period.

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John Simon

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For once I am in complete agreement with the majority of my colleagues: Ragtime, the movie, does not work, largely because one misses the kaleidoscopic construction of the Doctorow novel. Milos Forman, the director, and Michael Weller, the scenarist, chose what they felt to be the principal strands of this multifarious web: Evelyn Nesbit and the celebrated murder case; Coalhouse Walker Jr., the black musician with his fanatical and fatal quest for justice; Tateh, the impoverished Jewish immigrant who works himself up into a movie director; and the typical turn-ofthe-century American family that gets itself embroiled with all of them.

Some of the many subplots and characters beyond these make all but subliminal appearances (e.g., Houdini), some ended up on the cutting-room floor (e.g., Emma Goldman), and quite a few (e.g., Henry Ford, J. P. Morgan, Dreiser, Freud, Zapata) never even passed their screenplay test. So, instead of freewheeling ragtime, we get a fugue, and a rather unbalanced one at that, with Coalhouse and his vendetta given top priority. A good deal of Doctorow’s irreverent, ahistoric, but politically satiric jocularity bites the dust in the process. But could the filmmakers have stayed faithful to the novel? The printed page can work as a kaleidoscope because the reader takes the shuffling and reshuffling images at his own pace, making his quietus whenever he may choose; but a screen-sized kaleidoscope shimmying around relentlessly for several hours would leave audiences dizzy and confused—if it did not just make them leave, period.