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Adapted Screenplay Contenders
Most of the year’s adapted screenplay contenders are period pieces, though the “period” may be as recent as the last decade. Throw in grim fairy tale musical “Into the Woods” and it’s truly a lineup dominated by “once upon a time” tales. The exceptions, including “American Sniper” and “Gone Girl,” are probing, naturalistic stories confronting issues that can make for uncomfortable conversation in polite society. Good for them.
“American Sniper”
Jason Dean Hall; Chris Kyle (book)(Warner Bros)
The script, based on Kyle’s memoirs, seems to take the audience in one direction, then challenges expectations. It celebrates the heroism of soldiers while providing a devastating account of the toll it takes on them.
“Gone Girl”
Gillian Flynn (Fox)
Adapting her own labyrinthine page-turner, Flynn spun a dense and absorbing narrative embedded with playful, provocative ideas about men, women and the state of modern marriage.
“The Homesman”
Tommy Lee Jones, Kieran Fitzgerald, Wesley A. Oliver (screenplay); Glendon Swarthout (novel) (Roadside Attractions, Saban Films)
Jones is an Academy favorite for his acting. Some of that goodwill might transfer to this unconventional Western based on Swarthout’s novel, which won a Wrangler Award in 1989.
“Into the Woods”
James Lapine (screenplay, musical); Stephen Sondheim (musical) (Disney)
If a beloved Sondheim musical must be pared down, who better to do it than Lapine, its original Broadway director? All the elements are there — the fairy tale wonder and the cautionary-tale darkness, but opened up for the screen.
“The Imitation Game”
Graham Moore (screenplay); Andrew Hodges (book) (The Weinstein Co.)
Moore, making his screenwriting debut, takes a potentially dry subject — breaking the Nazi Enigma code — and makes it smart, funny and moving, enlarging the topic to celebrate anyone who is not “normal.”
“Inherent Vice”
Paul Thomas Anderson (screenplay); Thomas Pynchon (novel (Warner Bros.)
Voters may want to give Anderson extra points for being the first filmmaker to bring Pynchon to the screen, and for pruning down the novel while retaining its surreal and hilarious digressions.
“A Most Wanted Man”
Andrew Bovell (screenplay); John le Carré (book) (Roadside Attractions)
This gripping post-9/11 spy tale, set in a grim unsettled Hamburg, Germany, features a towering performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman (his last) as the conflicted but determined CIA “cut-out” operative.
“The Theory of Everything”
Anthony McCarten (screenplay); Jane Hawking (book) (Focus Features)
McCarten audaciously finds parallels between the soaring achievements of a genius striving to explain time itself and the arc of a relationship, as two souls fall in and out of love over time.
“Wild”
Nick Hornby (screenplay); Cheryl Strayed (book) (Fox Searchlight)
Novelist Hornby (“About a Boy,” “High Fidelity”) restructures Strayed’s memoir as a series of flashbacks while she’s on the trail, with the bulk of her bad behavior (sex and drug addiction) taking a back seat to the poignant root of her dysfunction: the loss of her mother to cancer.
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