Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451, or How I Stopped Burning Books, is a plug for Library Week. Librarians -- half a smile, coughdrops, their hair restrained in buns -- should champion it. The movie has that peculiar fate because Truffaut strated using Ray Bradbury material and didn't know when to stop.

Truffaut creates an aura of sterility around everything in the hero's life. His job (he's the book-burner) is to regulate his students' behavior (they're the future book-burners) in class and to follow a strict regimen himself on the truck. Oskar Werner demonstrates with tight-lipped professionalism that the first place to look for a book is the toaster. He stands out against the brash red of the fire engine--black uniform, arms akimbo--like a medieval executioner. His domestic life is equally grim. His wife is preoccupied with the puppets and parrots on their mammoth television screen. The two live in that great monument to sterility: a mod house. Streamlined furniture done up in cool blues and decorator yellows. The warmth of stainless steel.

But Truffaut shows the hidden sensuality of these people, There is a boy in the public gardens standing with two arms clasping round his back. A policeman patrolling the garden comes by and knocks him with a stick. We expect to see a couple fall apart: instead the boy's own arms drop to his sides. There is a lady operator who suspects that the couple behind her have a relationship closer than street-hello acquaintance. The lady operator has no one. She strokes the white fur around her shoulders. There is a quick shot of the book burner's wife standing in front of a mirror with her hand on one breast. Each of them is missing some person. They long for some human connection. But they don't reach out. They caress themselves.

The book burner does reach out, finally. He discovers the personality of other begins through books--he begins with David Copperfield and responds to someone for the first time.

From here, Truffaut goes wrong. He surrenders to Bradbury's too-nifty plot: at the beginning all books were burned; now all will be rescued, in fact, memorized. That's some triumph; it negates the force of the whole movie. Werner had been tending toward humanity. Having turned from a mechanical life to an emotional-life-via-books, he could have turned even further--to real experience. After all, the girl was there. It was she who teased him into realizing he was unhappy and tempted him into reading. (Julie Christie plays both the wife and the tease. As one, she looks vacuous; as the other, she looks pallid--in fact, she looks as though she spent the first 16 years of her life drowning.)

But at the end there are masses of people passing within speaking, within touching distance of each other--all muttering gibberish, eyes glazed, isolated. Truffaut cops out, He converts into a robot the hero he sets out to humanize. The music swells up and insists: be exhilarated! That's after 90-odd minutes of tedium.