Steve, a film Max Porter adapted from his own novella Shy, asks us to consider what we expect from adaptation. On the page, we enter inside the mind of a teenage boy. It’s chaotic in there. We’re torn violently between love and self-obliteration, between the feeling of being very big to the feeling of being very small, always in flux and never safe. The boy, Shy, is at a boarding school for troubled kids in England in 1995. It’s known as their “Last Chance”. Porter’s writing is a provocation to sympathy. He’s asking us, before we cast our judgment, to at least live a little while inside this maelstrom.
For the screen, however, Porter chose to – in his words – “rewrite” rather than to adapt. Steve tells the same story from the point of view of the school’s headteacher, who in the novella is a rare, unwaveringly kind voice. It’s nice to see an author treat cinema as something more than an accessory to their own work. Ultimately, it’s a daring choice that yields limited results.
