After many years of false starts, a film of Martin Amis’s 1989 novel “London Fields” has entered production, Deadline reported yesterday. It marks the feature debut of the prolific American commercial and music video director Matthew Cullen, who replaced Shekhar Kapur. Filmmakers previously attached to the project before Kapur included David Cronenberg and Michael Winterbottom.
Roberta Hanley’s screenplay for the fatalistic millenarian comedy thriller, which can be read online, is dated 2001. Amis apparently contributed to it.
The casting will trouble many fans of the book. Billy Bob Thornton is a canny choice to play the doomed protagonist, Samson Young (“I failed, in art and love”), but Amber Heard— though a capably seductive actress — won’t have been many people’s first choice to play Nicola Six, the 34-year-old femme fatale who is one of Amis’s most complex (and some say sexist) constructs. It screamed out for an actress capable of being both plausible and taunting — Eva Green or Lena Headey, say. Maybe Heard’s enigmatic smile will work.
The English actors Jim Sturgess and Theo James are playing Keith Talent and Guy Clinch, the men whom Nicola sexually beguiles. Keith is the darts-playing lout, and husband with an abused infant and many mistresses, whom Nicola nominates as her murderer; Guy is the repressed toff who nurtures the illusion that she is chaste: lust brings both classes to their knees. Back in 1989, Ray Winstone (as Keith) and Charles Dance could have excelled in these roles — perhaps opposite Frances Barber or Joanne Whalley. It wasn’t to be, nor, alas, was Cronenberg’s involvement.
There’s no news yet on casting for Chick Purchase, Keith’s fellow darts-man and nemesis. Although the script shows that Sam stays in the London flat of Mark Asprey, Amis’s off-the-page surrogate and the most potent of Nicola’s many lovers, he will stay off-screen, too.
News of the film’s emergence (under the auspices of Muse Productions, Hero Entertainment, and Media Talent Group) prompted me to revisit my April 1990 Village Voice book review of “London Fields.” It began:
“Named not after the eponymous district of East London but after the force fields where we lure and wreck one another, Martin Amis’s sixth novel is a mordant fin de millénaire entropy in the post-Thatcherite toilet that Britain has become by 1999. Having excoriated the 20th century’s addictive vices in ‘Money’ and sweated about nuclear holocaust in ‘Einstein’s Monsters,’ Amis merges these themes in a slim, contrived plot modeled on Nabokov’s ‘Despair’ and narrated by a Bellovian American writer, Samson Young. Dying of an undisclosed disease, Sam has chanced upon beautiful Nicola Six, and is racing to novelize the infernal triangle she has created before time runs out – for her, for him, for the moribund plane itself.”
“It’s a lingering chronicle of death foretold,” the review continued. “Nicola knows she is destined to die on her 35th birthday, a few hours after Guy Fawkes night, and – a victim of men – she has decided to incinerate two guys in the process: here elected murderer Keith Talent, a streetunwise proletarian cheat; and her foil, Guy Clinch, a nice, titled, unhappily married dreamer.”
“She bewitches Guy with the myth that she is a virgin dedicated to finding the Lost Son, Little Boy, of her friend Enola Gay. She patronizes Keith’s dream of fame as a TV darts champion, encouraging him by performing sex videos in lewd underwear bought with Guy’s money. After some 400 pages of playing these dupes against each other, Nicola girds herself up as the ultimate slut and heads across London like a cruise missile, a sex dart, to annihilate them.”
It wasn’t an inaccurate plot description. But can a movie based on a novel published 24 years ago get away with this kind of thing in 2013? Will the Cold War allegory get lost in translation to the screen? Will there finally be a successful Amis feature film following the disappointments of “The Rachel Papers” (1989) and “Dead Babies” (2000), and the migration of “Money” — without Gary Oldman, Amis’s choice for its star— to television in 2010? As Amis wrote on the first page of London Fields, “Oh, the pregnant agitation.”
