The World According to Garp

George Roy Hill’s film adaptation of [John Irving’s novel] The World According to Garp has taste, intelligence, craft and numerous other virtues going for it. Read full review

If it was finally the book's whimsical side that endeared it to so many readers, the movie is missing none of that charm. If anything, it's got a little more...A gentle, intelligent film and an interesting one. Read full review

The movie version of Garp, however, left me entertained but unmoved, and perhaps the movie's basic failing is that it did not inspire me to walk out on it. Something has to be wrong with a film that can take material as intractable as Garp and make it palatable. Read full review

Robin Williams discards his Morkisms for a credible portrait of the fated hero, and the rest of the cast is remarkably good, especially Mary Beth Hurt as his wife, Glenn Close as his mother and John Lithgow as the transsexual former tight end of the Philadelphia Eagles. [23 July 1982]

Writer Tesich, previously responsible for Four Friends and Breaking Away, serves Irving's material straight up - the adaptation is thorough and four-square and seemingly unconscious of the bizarre nature of Garp's odyssey through modern mores. The strategy works. [23 July 1982]

Nothing convinces, but the film is fitfully appealing. Read full review

The masochistic gifted-victim game has been played in recent American writing on just about every conceivable level, but Irving's novel is still something special: he created a whole hideous and deformed women's political group (the Ellen Jamesians) in order to have his author-hero, his alter ego, destroyed by it, and the film is faithful to Irving's vision.

The script might have benefited from being directed by someone more daring, instead George Roy Hill settles for more mainstream territory. Read full review

Williams is cuddly enough as the man whose talents for nurturing a family are constantly undermined by a malign fate, and there is a performance of some dignity from Lithgow as a six-and-a-half-foot ex-pro footballer transsexual. But it's the kind of movie which is brave - or stupid - enough to ask the meaning of life without having enough arse in its breeches to warrant a reply. Read full review

Williams, might have been more aggressive. Otherwise, director Roy Hill has done about as well as you can when translating word to image, not only through plot, but via the repetition of symbols: primitive, obvious ones -- the toad, a death's head costume, a child's clumsy drawings. After two hours and 20 minutes, all the parables and paradoxes join in a sluggish whole. And we wind up where we began, up in the air without a tail gunner. [23 July 1982, p.11]

Empty shortening of Irving's book reaches for profundity, and comes up courageous but brainless. Read full review

The World According to Garp is another of those films that fairly cries out for Robert Altman, who makes movies the way John Irving writes books. Altman doesn't seem to be making movies any more, so this is as close we're able to get to Garp, and it's not close enough. [23 July 1982, p.D10]

For all its isolated lovely touches--there's a wonderful moment of repose while Garp listens to Nat King Cole on his car radio--the movie leaves a cold, sour aftertaste. Some of this can be attributed to the uncertain tone of Hill's direction--overly broad here, too remote there--but much of it goes back to Irving. [26 July 1982, p.77]

What is missing from the movie is any attempt to discover a cinematic language that compares with the language of the novel. Where the book jumped, the movie plods; where the novelist came upon his themes in the course of rich exploration, the movie marches up and confronts them with all the subtlety of a morning-talk-show host. It is hard to recall any recent movie, of whatever literary lineage, that is as dully literal and unadventurous as this one. Read full review