As any reader of John Irving's popular novel knows, a lot happens in "The World According to Garp"—assassinations, attempted assassinations, grotesque mutilations, grotesque self-mutilations, a dog biting a man, a man biting a dog, rape, marital infidelity…. A high percentage of these bizarre events has been preserved in George Roy Hill's ambitious attempt to bring "Garp" to the screen, but what the movie cannot do is supply the glue that binds them together—Irving's jaunty, muscular narrative presence, which goes to the mat against life's absurdities to emerge bloodied but unbowed.
A lot of people felt that "Garp" couldn't be made into a movie. A lot of people were right. Take away the prose, and one is left with a concatenation of events that seems increasingly—and distastefully—gratuitous. Even when the artist's theme is the randomness of fate, it's his challenge to make that randomness cohere. What happens in Steve Tesich's screenplay seems willed by literary fiat. When anything can happen at any given moment no matter what—a sniper busting up a feminist rally one instant, a plane crashing into a house the next—the audience begins to feel like puppets on a string. Anyone unfamiliar with Irving's book will have precious little notion of where the story is leading, of why he is on this particular journey with a man named Garp. Tesich and director Hill have tried to compensate for the book's picaresque, stop-start form by loading it down with thematic and visual symmetry—repeated images of flying and heavy foreshadowings of death…. But these fancy cosmetic touches can't disguise that old problem: how do you make a writer's internal struggles dramatic?…
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