The Corrections
Encyclopedia
The Corrections is a 2001
novel
by American
author Jonathan Franzen
. It revolves around the troubles of an elderly Midwestern
couple and their three adult children, tracing their lives from the mid-twentieth century to "one last Christmas
" together near the turn of the millennium. The novel was awarded the National Book Award
in 2001 and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize
in 2002.
Alfred Lambert is a railroad engineer
and the stern patriarch of the Lambert family, based in the fictional town of St. Jude. After his children grow up and move to the east coast, Alfred retires, but soon begins to suffer from Parkinson's disease
, causing his organized and repressed personality to fracture. Alfred's loyal wife Enid has long suffered from his tyrannical behavior, but his increasing dementia
makes her life still harder. She is also tortured by the questionable life choices of her three children and their abandonment of midwestern Protestant values. As the economic boom of the late nineties goes into full swing, the families' massive problems become impossible to ignore.
Gary, the eldest Lambert son, is a successful but seemingly depressed and alcoholic banker in Philadelphia who suspects his life is carefully controlled by his manipulative wife and children. Chip, the middle child, is a Marxist academic whose disastrous affair with a student loses him a tenure-track job and lands him in the employ of a Lithuania
n crime boss defrauding American investors. Denise, the youngest of the family, is a successful chef in Philadelphia, but loses her job after interlocking romances with both her boss and his wife.
The separate plot-lines converge on Christmas
morning back in St. Jude, when Enid and her children are forced to confront Alfred's accelerating physical and mental decline. This causes them to honestly assess their own flaws and begin to make the "corrections" that give the book its name.
"The Correction, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle let-down, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets..."
This economic correction parallels the simultaneous "corrections" that Franzen's characters make to their own lives in the novel's final pages. Franzen has said that "the most important corrections of the book are the sudden impingements of truth or reality on characters who are expending ever larger sums of energy on self-deception or denial." Enid becomes more flexible in her worldview and less submissive to her husband's authority, and Chip begins a more mature relationship with a woman, simultaneously reconciling with his father. Gary, the only central character who fails to learn from his mistakes and grow during the course of the novel, loses a lot of money as technology stocks begin to decline.
Another key theme in the book is America's transition from an industrial economy to an economy based largely on the financial, high-tech and service sectors. Alfred, a railroad engineer with a pension and a deep loyalty to his company, embodies the old economic order of mid-twentieth century America. His children, a chef, an investment banker, and a professor/internet entrepreneur, embody the new economic order at the turn of the millennium. Franzen depicts this economic transition most concretely in his descriptions of Denise's workplace, an abandoned Philadelphia coal plant converted into a trendy, expensive restaurant.
The narrative of Chip's involvement with Gitana's attempt to bring the country of Lithuania to the market - "lithuania.com" on the internet - comments on unrestrained capitalism and the privileges and power of the wealthy while meaningful distinctions between private and public sectors disappear. "The main difference between America and Lithuania, as far as Chip could see, was that in America the wealthy few subdued the unwealthy many by means of mind-numbing and soul-killing entertainments and gadgetry and pharmaceuticals, whereas in Lithuania the powerful few subdued the unpowerful many by threatening violence."
The book addresses conflicts and issues within a family that arise from the presence of a progressive debilitating disease of an elder. As Alfred’s dementia and parkinsonism unfold mercilessly, they affect Enid and all three children eliciting different and over time changing reactions. Medical help and hype - the latter in the form of the investigatory drug “Corecktall” - do not provide a solution. At the end, Alfred refuses to eat and dies, the ultimate “correction” of the problem.
, was nominated for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
and the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award
, and was shortlisted for the 2003 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
. In 2005, The Corrections was included in TIME magazine's
list of the 100 best English-language novels
. In 2006, Bret Easton Ellis
declared the novel "one of the three great books of my generation." In 2009, website The Millions
polled 48 writers, critics, and editors, including Joshua Ferris
, Sam Anderson, and Lorin Stein
. The panel voted The Corrections the best novel of the first decade of the millennium "by a landslide".
The novel was a selection of Oprah's Book Club
in 2001. Franzen caused some controversy when he publicly expressed his ambivalence at his novel having been chosen by the club due to its inevitable association with the "schmaltzy" books selected in the past. As a result, Winfrey rescinded her invitation to him to appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show
.
Entertainment Weekly
put The Corrections on its end-of-the-decade "best-of" list, saying, "Forget all the Oprah hoo-ha: Franzen's 2001 doorstop of a domestic drama teaches that, yes, you can go home again. But you might not want to."
of his earlier novels and towards literary realism
. In a conversation with novelist Donald Antrim
for BOMB Magazine
, Franzen said of this stylistic change, "Simply to write a book that wasn't dressed up in a swashbuckling, Pynchon-sized megaplot was enormously difficult." Critics pointed out many similarities between Franzen's childhood in St. Louis and the novel, but the work is not an autobiography. Franzen said in an interview that "the most important experience of my life ... is the experience of growing up in the Midwest with the particular parents I had. I feel as if they couldn’t fully speak for themselves, and I feel as if their experience—by which I mean their values, their experience of being alive, of being born at the beginning of the century and dying towards the end of it, that whole American experience they had—[is] part of me. One of my enterprises in the book is to memorialize that experience, to give it real life and form." The novel also focuses on topics such as the multi-generational transmission of family dysfunction and the waste inherent in today's consumer economy, and each of the characters "embody the conflicting consciousnesses and the personal and social dramas of our era." Influenced by Franzen's life, the novel in turn influenced it; during its writing, he said in 2002, he moved "away from an angry and frightened isolation toward an acceptance – even a celebration – of being a reader and a writer."
In a Newsweek
feature on American culture during the George W. Bush
administration, Jennie Yabroff said that despite being released less than a year into Bush's term and before the September 11 attacks, The Corrections "anticipates almost eerily the major concerns of the next seven years." According to Yabroff, a study of The Corrections demonstrates that much of the apprehension and disquiet that is seen as characteristic of the Bush era and post-9/11 America actually predated both. In this way, the novel is both characteristic of its time and prophetic of things to come; for Yabroff, even the controversy with Oprah, which saw Franzen branded an "elitist", was symptomatic of the subsequent course of American culture, with its increasingly prominent anti-elitist strain. She argues that The Corrections stands above later novels which focus on similar themes, because unlike its successors it addresses these themes without being "hamstrung by the 9/11 problem" which preoccupied Bush-era novels by writers such as Don DeLillo
, Jay McInerney
, and Jonathan Safran Foer
.
optioned the film rights to The Corrections for Paramount Pictures
. As of December 2010 the rights have not yet been turned into a finished film.
In 2002, the film was said to be in pre-production
, with Stephen Daldry
attached to direct and dramatist David Hare
working on the screenplay. In October 2002, Franzen gave Entertainment Weekly
a wish cast-list for the film, saying, "If they told me Gene Hackman
was going to do Alfred, I would be delighted. If they told me they had cast Cate Blanchett
as [Alfred's daughter] Denise, I would be jumping up and down, even though officially I really don't care what they do with the movie."
In January 2005, Variety announced that, with Daldry presumably off the project, Robert Zemeckis
was developing Hare's script "with an eye toward directing." In August 2005, Variety confirmed that the director would definitely be helming The Corrections. Around this time, it was rumored that the cast would include Judi Dench
as the family matriarch Enid, along with Brad Pitt
, Tim Robbins
, and Naomi Watts
as her three children. In January 2007, Variety wrote that Hare was still at work on the film's screenplay.
In September, 2011, it was announced that Rudin and the screenwriter
and director Noah Baumbach
were preparing The Corrections as a "drama series project," to potentially co-star Anthony Hopkins
and air on the cable channel HBO
. Baumbach and Franzen collaborated on the screenplay, which Baumbach would direct. In 2011, it was announced that Chris Cooper and Dianne West will star in the HBO adaptation. In November 2011, it was announced that Ewan McGregor has joined the cast.
2001 in literature
The year 2001 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* The film version of J. R. R. Tolkien's classic book, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, is released to movie theaters...
novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
by American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
author Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. His third novel, The Corrections , a sprawling, satirical family drama, drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction...
. It revolves around the troubles of an elderly Midwestern
Midwestern United States
The Midwestern United States is one of the four U.S. geographic regions defined by the United States Census Bureau, providing an official definition of the American Midwest....
couple and their three adult children, tracing their lives from the mid-twentieth century to "one last Christmas
Christmas
Christmas or Christmas Day is an annual holiday generally celebrated on December 25 by billions of people around the world. It is a Christian feast that commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ, liturgically closing the Advent season and initiating the season of Christmastide, which lasts twelve days...
" together near the turn of the millennium. The novel was awarded the National Book Award
National Book Award
The National Book Awards are a set of American literary awards. Started in 1950, the Awards are presented annually to American authors for literature published in the current year. In 1989 the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization which now oversees and manages the National Book...
in 2001 and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize
James Tait Black Memorial Prize
Founded in 1919, the James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are among the oldest and most prestigious book prizes awarded for literature written in the English language and are Britain's oldest literary awards...
in 2002.
Plot summary
The Corrections focuses on the Lamberts, a traditional and somewhat repressed Midwestern family, whose children have fled to the east coast to start new lives free from the influence of their parents. The novel moves back and forth in time throughout the late twentieth century, depicting the personal growth and mistakes of each family member in detail. The book climaxes around the time of the technology driven economic boom of the late nineties as the troubled family's problems begin to boil to the surface.Alfred Lambert is a railroad engineer
Engineer
An engineer is a professional practitioner of engineering, concerned with applying scientific knowledge, mathematics and ingenuity to develop solutions for technical problems. Engineers design materials, structures, machines and systems while considering the limitations imposed by practicality,...
and the stern patriarch of the Lambert family, based in the fictional town of St. Jude. After his children grow up and move to the east coast, Alfred retires, but soon begins to suffer from Parkinson's disease
Parkinson's disease
Parkinson's disease is a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system...
, causing his organized and repressed personality to fracture. Alfred's loyal wife Enid has long suffered from his tyrannical behavior, but his increasing dementia
Dementia
Dementia is a serious loss of cognitive ability in a previously unimpaired person, beyond what might be expected from normal aging...
makes her life still harder. She is also tortured by the questionable life choices of her three children and their abandonment of midwestern Protestant values. As the economic boom of the late nineties goes into full swing, the families' massive problems become impossible to ignore.
Gary, the eldest Lambert son, is a successful but seemingly depressed and alcoholic banker in Philadelphia who suspects his life is carefully controlled by his manipulative wife and children. Chip, the middle child, is a Marxist academic whose disastrous affair with a student loses him a tenure-track job and lands him in the employ of a Lithuania
Lithuania
Lithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the biggest of the three Baltic states. It is situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, whereby to the west lie Sweden and Denmark...
n crime boss defrauding American investors. Denise, the youngest of the family, is a successful chef in Philadelphia, but loses her job after interlocking romances with both her boss and his wife.
The separate plot-lines converge on Christmas
Christmas
Christmas or Christmas Day is an annual holiday generally celebrated on December 25 by billions of people around the world. It is a Christian feast that commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ, liturgically closing the Advent season and initiating the season of Christmastide, which lasts twelve days...
morning back in St. Jude, when Enid and her children are forced to confront Alfred's accelerating physical and mental decline. This causes them to honestly assess their own flaws and begin to make the "corrections" that give the book its name.
Themes
The title of "The Corrections" refers most literally to the decline of the technology-driven economic boom of the late nineties. Franzen makes this clear at the beginning of the book's final chapter, also titled "The Corrections:""The Correction, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle let-down, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets..."
This economic correction parallels the simultaneous "corrections" that Franzen's characters make to their own lives in the novel's final pages. Franzen has said that "the most important corrections of the book are the sudden impingements of truth or reality on characters who are expending ever larger sums of energy on self-deception or denial." Enid becomes more flexible in her worldview and less submissive to her husband's authority, and Chip begins a more mature relationship with a woman, simultaneously reconciling with his father. Gary, the only central character who fails to learn from his mistakes and grow during the course of the novel, loses a lot of money as technology stocks begin to decline.
Another key theme in the book is America's transition from an industrial economy to an economy based largely on the financial, high-tech and service sectors. Alfred, a railroad engineer with a pension and a deep loyalty to his company, embodies the old economic order of mid-twentieth century America. His children, a chef, an investment banker, and a professor/internet entrepreneur, embody the new economic order at the turn of the millennium. Franzen depicts this economic transition most concretely in his descriptions of Denise's workplace, an abandoned Philadelphia coal plant converted into a trendy, expensive restaurant.
The narrative of Chip's involvement with Gitana's attempt to bring the country of Lithuania to the market - "lithuania.com" on the internet - comments on unrestrained capitalism and the privileges and power of the wealthy while meaningful distinctions between private and public sectors disappear. "The main difference between America and Lithuania, as far as Chip could see, was that in America the wealthy few subdued the unwealthy many by means of mind-numbing and soul-killing entertainments and gadgetry and pharmaceuticals, whereas in Lithuania the powerful few subdued the unpowerful many by threatening violence."
The book addresses conflicts and issues within a family that arise from the presence of a progressive debilitating disease of an elder. As Alfred’s dementia and parkinsonism unfold mercilessly, they affect Enid and all three children eliciting different and over time changing reactions. Medical help and hype - the latter in the form of the investigatory drug “Corecktall” - do not provide a solution. At the end, Alfred refuses to eat and dies, the ultimate “correction” of the problem.
Reception
The novel won the 2001 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2002 James Tait Black Memorial PrizeJames Tait Black Memorial Prize
Founded in 1919, the James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are among the oldest and most prestigious book prizes awarded for literature written in the English language and are Britain's oldest literary awards...
, was nominated for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
National Book Critics Circle Award
The National Book Critics Circle Award is an annual award given by the National Book Critics Circle to promote the finest books and reviews published in English....
and the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award
PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
The PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction is awarded annually by the PEN/Faulkner Foundation to the authors of the year's best works of fiction by living American citizens. The winner receives US $15,000 and each of four runners-up receives US $5000. The foundation brings the winner and runners-up to...
, and was shortlisted for the 2003 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award is an international literary award for a work of fiction, jointly sponsored by the city of Dublin, Ireland and the company IMPAC. At €100,000 it is one of the richest literary prizes in the world...
. In 2005, The Corrections was included in TIME magazine's
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
list of the 100 best English-language novels
TIME's List of the 100 Best Novels
Times List of the 100 Best Novels, is an unranked list of the 100 best novels—and 10 best graphic novels—published in the English language between 1923 and 2005. The list was compiled by Time critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo....
. In 2006, Bret Easton Ellis
Bret Easton Ellis
Bret Easton Ellis is an American novelist and short story writer. His works have been translated into 27 different languages. He was regarded as one of the so-called literary Brat Pack, which also included Tama Janowitz and Jay McInerney...
declared the novel "one of the three great books of my generation." In 2009, website The Millions
The Millions
The Millions is an online literary magazine created by C. Max Magee in 2003. It contains articles about literary topics and book reviews.The Millions has several regular contributors as well as frequent guest appearances by literary notables, including Rosecrans Baldwin, Josh Bazell, Mark Binelli,...
polled 48 writers, critics, and editors, including Joshua Ferris
Joshua Ferris
Joshua Ferris is an American author best known for his debut 2007 novel Then We Came to the End. The book is a comedy about the American workplace, told in the first-person plural...
, Sam Anderson, and Lorin Stein
Lorin Stein
Lorin H. Stein is an American critic, editor, and translator. He is the editor of The Paris Review.-Biography:Stein was born and raised in Washington, D.C., where he attended the Sidwell Friends School. He graduated from Yale College in 1995...
. The panel voted The Corrections the best novel of the first decade of the millennium "by a landslide".
The novel was a selection of Oprah's Book Club
Oprah's Book Club
Oprah's Book Club was a book discussion club segment of the American talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show, highlighting books chosen by host Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey started the book club in 1996, selecting a new novel for viewers to read and discuss each month. The Club ended its 15-year run, along with...
in 2001. Franzen caused some controversy when he publicly expressed his ambivalence at his novel having been chosen by the club due to its inevitable association with the "schmaltzy" books selected in the past. As a result, Winfrey rescinded her invitation to him to appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show
The Oprah Winfrey Show
The Oprah Winfrey Show is an American syndicated talk show hosted and produced by its namesake Oprah Winfrey. It ran nationally for 25 seasons beginning in 1986, before concluding in 2011. It is the highest-rated talk show in American television history....
.
Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, broadway theatre, books and popular culture...
put The Corrections on its end-of-the-decade "best-of" list, saying, "Forget all the Oprah hoo-ha: Franzen's 2001 doorstop of a domestic drama teaches that, yes, you can go home again. But you might not want to."
Criticism
With The Corrections, Franzen moved away from the postmodernismPostmodern literature
The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain characteristics of post–World War II literature and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature.Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is hard to define and there is little agreement on the exact...
of his earlier novels and towards literary realism
Literary realism
Literary realism most often refers to the trend, beginning with certain works of nineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors in various countries, towards depictions of contemporary life and society "as they were." In the spirit of...
. In a conversation with novelist Donald Antrim
Donald Antrim
Donald Antrim is an American novelist. His first novel, Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, was published in 1993...
for BOMB Magazine
Bomb Magazine
BOMB is a quarterly magazine edited by artists and writers. It is composed, primarily, of interviews between creative people working in a variety of disciplines — visual art, literature, music, film, theater and architecture....
, Franzen said of this stylistic change, "Simply to write a book that wasn't dressed up in a swashbuckling, Pynchon-sized megaplot was enormously difficult." Critics pointed out many similarities between Franzen's childhood in St. Louis and the novel, but the work is not an autobiography. Franzen said in an interview that "the most important experience of my life ... is the experience of growing up in the Midwest with the particular parents I had. I feel as if they couldn’t fully speak for themselves, and I feel as if their experience—by which I mean their values, their experience of being alive, of being born at the beginning of the century and dying towards the end of it, that whole American experience they had—[is] part of me. One of my enterprises in the book is to memorialize that experience, to give it real life and form." The novel also focuses on topics such as the multi-generational transmission of family dysfunction and the waste inherent in today's consumer economy, and each of the characters "embody the conflicting consciousnesses and the personal and social dramas of our era." Influenced by Franzen's life, the novel in turn influenced it; during its writing, he said in 2002, he moved "away from an angry and frightened isolation toward an acceptance – even a celebration – of being a reader and a writer."
In a Newsweek
Newsweek
Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...
feature on American culture during the George W. Bush
George W. Bush
George Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States, from 2001 to 2009. Before that, he was the 46th Governor of Texas, having served from 1995 to 2000....
administration, Jennie Yabroff said that despite being released less than a year into Bush's term and before the September 11 attacks, The Corrections "anticipates almost eerily the major concerns of the next seven years." According to Yabroff, a study of The Corrections demonstrates that much of the apprehension and disquiet that is seen as characteristic of the Bush era and post-9/11 America actually predated both. In this way, the novel is both characteristic of its time and prophetic of things to come; for Yabroff, even the controversy with Oprah, which saw Franzen branded an "elitist", was symptomatic of the subsequent course of American culture, with its increasingly prominent anti-elitist strain. She argues that The Corrections stands above later novels which focus on similar themes, because unlike its successors it addresses these themes without being "hamstrung by the 9/11 problem" which preoccupied Bush-era novels by writers such as Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo is an American author, playwright, and occasional essayist whose work paints a detailed portrait of American life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries...
, Jay McInerney
Jay McInerney
John Barrett McInerney Jr. is an American writer. His novels include Bright Lights, Big City; Ransom; Story of My Life; Brightness Falls; and The Last of the Savages...
, and Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer is an American author best known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close...
.
Film adaptation
In August 2001, producer Scott RudinScott Rudin
Scott Rudin is an American film producer and a theatrical producer.-Early life and work:Scott Rudin was born in New York City, NY, on July 14, 1958, and raised in the town of Baldwin on Long Island. At the age of sixteen, he started working as an assistant to theatre producer Kermit Bloomgarden...
optioned the film rights to The Corrections for Paramount Pictures
Paramount Pictures
Paramount Pictures Corporation is an American film production and distribution company, located at 5555 Melrose Avenue in Hollywood. Founded in 1912 and currently owned by media conglomerate Viacom, it is America's oldest existing film studio; it is also the last major film studio still...
. As of December 2010 the rights have not yet been turned into a finished film.
In 2002, the film was said to be in pre-production
Pre-production
Pre-production or In Production is the process of preparing all the elements involved in a film, play, or other performance.- In film :...
, with Stephen Daldry
Stephen Daldry
Stephen David Daldry, CBE is an English theatre and film director and producer, as well as a three-time Academy Award nominated and Tony Award winning director.-Early years:...
attached to direct and dramatist David Hare
David Hare (dramatist)
Sir David Hare is an English playwright and theatre and film director.-Early life:Hare was born in St Leonards-on-Sea, Hastings, East Sussex, the son of Agnes and Clifford Hare, a sailor. He was educated at Lancing, an independent school in West Sussex, and at Jesus College, Cambridge...
working on the screenplay. In October 2002, Franzen gave Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, broadway theatre, books and popular culture...
a wish cast-list for the film, saying, "If they told me Gene Hackman
Gene Hackman
Eugene Allen "Gene" Hackman is an American actor and novelist.Nominated for five Academy Awards, winning two, Hackman has also won three Golden Globes and two BAFTAs in a career that spanned five decades. He first came to fame in 1967 with his performance as Buck Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde...
was going to do Alfred, I would be delighted. If they told me they had cast Cate Blanchett
Cate Blanchett
Catherine Élise "Cate" Blanchett is an Australian actress. She came to international attention for her role as Elizabeth I of England in the 1998 biopic film Elizabeth, for which she won British Academy of Film and Television Arts and Golden Globe Awards, and earned her first Academy Award...
as [Alfred's daughter] Denise, I would be jumping up and down, even though officially I really don't care what they do with the movie."
In January 2005, Variety announced that, with Daldry presumably off the project, Robert Zemeckis
Robert Zemeckis
Robert Lee Zemeckis is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. Zemeckis first came to public attention in the 1980s as the director of the comedic time-travel Back to the Future film series, as well as the Academy Award-winning live-action/animation epic Who Framed Roger Rabbit ,...
was developing Hare's script "with an eye toward directing." In August 2005, Variety confirmed that the director would definitely be helming The Corrections. Around this time, it was rumored that the cast would include Judi Dench
Judi Dench
Dame Judith Olivia "Judi" Dench, CH, DBE, FRSA is an English film, stage and television actress.Dench made her professional debut in 1957 with the Old Vic Company. Over the following few years she played in several of William Shakespeare's plays in such roles as Ophelia in Hamlet, Juliet in Romeo...
as the family matriarch Enid, along with Brad Pitt
Brad Pitt
William Bradley "Brad" Pitt is an American actor and film producer. Pitt has received two Academy Award nominations and four Golden Globe Award nominations, winning one...
, Tim Robbins
Tim Robbins
Timothy Francis "Tim" Robbins is an American actor, screenwriter, director, producer, activist and musician. He is the former longtime partner of actress Susan Sarandon...
, and Naomi Watts
Naomi Watts
Naomi Ellen Watts is a British actress. Watts began her career in Australian television, where she appeared in series such as Hey Dad..! , Brides of Christ , and Home and Away . Her film debut was the 1986 drama For Love Alone...
as her three children. In January 2007, Variety wrote that Hare was still at work on the film's screenplay.
In September, 2011, it was announced that Rudin and the screenwriter
Screenwriter
Screenwriters or scriptwriters or scenario writers are people who write/create the short or feature-length screenplays from which mass media such as films, television programs, Comics or video games are based.-Profession:...
and director Noah Baumbach
Noah Baumbach
Noah Baumbach is an American writer, director and independent filmmaker.-Background and education:Baumbach was born in Brooklyn, New York City, the son of novelist/film critic Jonathan Baumbach and Village Voice critic Georgia Brown. He graduated from Brooklyn's Midwood High School in 1987 and ...
were preparing The Corrections as a "drama series project," to potentially co-star Anthony Hopkins
Anthony Hopkins
Sir Philip Anthony Hopkins, KBE , best known as Anthony Hopkins, is a Welsh actor of film, stage and television...
and air on the cable channel HBO
Home Box Office
HBO, short for Home Box Office, is an American premium cable television network, owned by Time Warner. , HBO's programming reaches 28.2 million subscribers in the United States, making it the second largest premium network in America . In addition to its U.S...
. Baumbach and Franzen collaborated on the screenplay, which Baumbach would direct. In 2011, it was announced that Chris Cooper and Dianne West will star in the HBO adaptation. In November 2011, it was announced that Ewan McGregor has joined the cast.
External links
- Jonathan Franzen's web page about The Corrections
- Interview with Franzen in BOMB magazine issue 77
- Listen to 2001 Interview with Jonathan Franzen, conducted by Terry GrossTerry GrossTerry Gross is the host and co-executive producer of Fresh Air, an interview format radio show produced by WHYY-FM in Philadelphia and distributed throughout the United States by National Public Radio....
on NPR's Fresh AirFresh AirFresh Air is an American radio talk show broadcast on National Public Radio stations across the United States. The show is produced by WHYY-FM in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Its longtime host is Terry Gross. , the show was syndicated to 450 stations and claimed 4.5 million listeners. The show... - Answering Viewers' Questions at Big Think from April 14, 2008
- The Complete Review: detailed summary and overview of reviews