On the debate about whether film adaptations can capture the texture of literary prose.

The challenge for any film adaptation of a prose novel is not the plot — plot transfers easily — but the texture: the specific quality of a writer's relationship to their material as revealed in syntax, imagery, and diction.

The camera cannot replicate the texture of Nabokov's prose. No visual equivalent exists for the specific pleasure of reading Lolita, which is the horror of being seduced by a monster's voice while understanding exactly what the monster is.

But some films find cinematic equivalents for literary texture that don't replicate the source but achieve the same effect by other means. Kubrick's Barry Lyndon is an adaptation of Thackeray that does something Thackeray does in prose — it constructs a beautiful object that implicates the viewer in its beauty, and the beauty is morally compromised by what's happening inside it.

The question for any adaptation should not be 'does it capture the book' but 'does it achieve what the book achieves.' These are different questions and the second one is the right one.