What went right
You made your name as a director with smart, capable literary adaptations: Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice in 2005, Ian McEwan’s Atonement in 2007, again with Keira Knightley. Those epic scenes on the beach at Dunkirk in 1940 were marvellous. There was also your flawed but perfectly decent Anna Karenina in 2012, adapted by Tom Stoppard, and once more with Knightley. This was lucid, elegant and stylish work and you were at your best developing material from the very best screenwriters and working sympathetically with a great female lead and showcasing her star quality. Above all else, it was film-making honestly aimed at grownups.
What went wrong
Pan. This awful “origin-myth” reboot of the Peter Pan was unworthy of you and a pay cheque you surely didn’t need. It was misconceived: a presumptuous and parasitic messing about with JM Barrie’s creation, in a spirit completely different to the intelligent respect you were paying to Austen and Tolstoy. The CGI fantasy action sequences were tiring and uninteresting and further undermined whatever human interest this film might conceivably have had. The actors were not permitted to give of their best with this daft unfunny material, and so your directorial work with them effectively went for nothing.
What you should do next
A big Hollywood blockbuster or superhero movie isn’t out of the question – Kenneth Branagh has shown how you can make something like this with brains. But a big new classy literary adaptation will allow you to crank up the IQ factor and flex your muscles as a director of actors, someone who can elicit emotion and nuance, and shape a scene. One suggestion could be a colossally epic adaptation of Robert Caro’s Lyndon B Johnson biography (or a part of it, in the manner of Spielberg’s Lincoln) with Tommy Lee Jones as LBJ and William Nicholson adapting.
Or you could direct a movie version, or conceivably a four-part HBO treatment, of Nell Zink’s novel Mislaid, adapted by, say, Patrick Marber. It is the story of Peggy, a young gay woman in 1950s America who finds herself getting married to Lee, her college professor, the scion of a wealthy family and also a poet. After two kids, their marriage collapses and she flees the family home, taking with her the daughter, Karen, while Lee keeps the son Byrdie, whom he raises as a privileged princeling – while Karen and her daughter decide to “pass” for African-American to hide from Lee. Brie Larson could play Peggy and Peter Sarsgaard, Lee. You could get your directorial teeth into this one, bringing out the strangeness of the situation, its zany screwball humour combined with something sadder and more painful, and there are some cracking dialogue scenes.
More in this series
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No more directing, Russell Crowe, or going soppy
A titanic Von Trier meltdown could get you back on track, Kate Winslet
Hey, Ryan Gosling, you’ve given girls advice, now let us return the favour
You need discipline, Nicolas Cage. Call Michael Haneke!
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