Sergio De La Pava, David Matthews, and Chase Palmer, 2021
“shunned by all and sundry”,
2021 Skandies
Even though no Skandies voters even saw this movie, I added it to my watch list for 2021 because A Naked Singularity was one of the best books I have yet read in the visitor recommendation series. In my writeup, I addressed how one of the most compelling aspects of the novel made it difficult to translate into film:
A Naked Singularity is a “write what you know” book: Sergio De La Pava is a New York City public defender of Colombian extraction, and his book is about a man named Casi who happens to be a New York City public defender of Colombian extraction. It begins with Casi on the job, picking up seven cases ranging from loitering to sexual assault. The purpose of this section is to give us a glimpse of his work life. In a movie this would last just long enough to squeeze in a quick montage featuring a handful of telling exchanges—maybe a couple of minutes. De La Pava gives us all seven complete interviews AND all seven complete arraignments.
Well, here’s the movie, and the opening montage isn’t even of Casi’s cases—it’s just a sample of life at the courthouse. We do see Casi working with a couple of clients, by which I mean literally two. And then…
…well, as I (dimly) recall, the book wove together four chief threads, namely:
Casi’s work as a public defender; this aspect of the book was phenomenal and by far the best thing about it
a long chronicle of the world of middleweight boxing circa the year 1980
a heist plot in which a sword-wielding Casi and his asshole colleague rob drug dealers
a sci-fi wrinkle, with indications that the laws of physics are breaking down
This movie completely dispenses with the boxing material, which is an extremely good decision. It tries to keep the other three threads in play, but it will probably come as no surprise that the heist is the movie’s chief concern. What snippets we see of Casi’s frustrations in his work are kept in primarily to serve as his motivation for participating in the heist, and the sci-fi stuff is just a random bit of flavor that doesn’t really affect the plot. As I recall, in the book the sci-fi stuff short-circuited the narrative, so the movie’s treatment of it may actually be an improvement. But the loss of so much of the material about the legal system made this feel a bit like a staging of Hamlet that excised most of the reflections on mortality in order to make sure that there was plenty of time for the swordfight.
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