Salman Rushdie Blasts Oscar-Nominated Films

Posted on February 24, 2009

Salman Rushdie, who is currently teaching at Emory University in Atlanta, has slammed the books and story that were made into Oscar-nominated films, including Slumdog Millionaire, The Reader and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. First off Rushdie found the film Slumdog Millionaire to be wildly improbable.

Rushdie was pointedly not joining in the applause for author Vikas Swarup and director Danny Boyle. "The movie piles impossibility on impossibility," he said in a lecture at Emory University in Atlanta, raising questions over how the characters end up at the Taj Mahal, 1,000 miles from where they were in the previous scene, and how they manage to get their hands on a gun in India.
And it wasn't only the film which came in for a slating, with Swarup's 2005 novel Q&A, on which Slumdog Millionaire is based, also criticised by the Booker prizewinner. "The problem with this adaptation begins with the work being adapted," he went on.
According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Rushdie wasn't too enamoured of two other Oscar winners adapted from books. The Reader is "[a] leaden, lifeless movie killed by respectability", he told the lecture, while The Curious Case of Benjamin Button "doesn't finally have anything to say". The Reader is based on Bernhard Schlink's Holocaust novel, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is adapted from an F Scott Fitzgerald short story.

He's certainly entitled to his opinions, but we do feel compelled to point out that Slumdog Millionaire is an uplifting, happy, Oscar-winning film that people really loved. It's a fantasy and a love story: it's not supposed to be realistic. As for Benjamin Button, the original short story is not much like the film version. For one thing, it's much more cynical about love. We think Rushdie is being overly grumpy about this. Perhaps he'll be more generous with his praise if one of his books is ever made into a film.