François Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 isn't a very good movie but the idea—which is rather dumb but in a way brilliant—has an almost irresistible appeal: people want to see it and then want to talk about how it should have been worked out. Fahrenheit 451 is more interesting in the talking-over afterward than in the seeing. (p. 146)

Of course, a gimmicky approach to the emptiness of life without books cannot convey what books mean or what they're for: homage to literature and wisdom cannot be paid through a trick shortcut to profundity; the skimpy science-fiction script cannot create characters or observation that would make us understand imaginatively what book deprivation might be like. (p. 147)

For American art-house audiences who are both more liberal and more bookish than the larger public, book burning is a just-about-perfect gimmick. Yet even at the science-fiction horror-story level, this movie fails—partly, I...