Death Note

2017 Netflix

Director: Adam Wingard

Writers: Charley Parlapanides & Vlas Parlapanides

Nat Wolff … Light Turner

Lakeith Stanfield … L

Margaret Qualley … Mia Sutton

Shea Whigham … James Turner

Willem Dafoe … Ryuk (voice)

Jason Liles … Ryuk

Paul Nakauchi … Watari

Death Note is, as Tom Waits might say, “big in Japan.” It is an immensely popular manga series (by Tsugumi Ohba & Takeshi Obata), a brilliant and much beloved anime, no less than 5 Japanese feature films, and…a musical. I’m told an English-language version of that last one is on its way. I’m intrigued. I guess if they can make a musical of Sweeney Todd (And it was a good one!) they can do the very dark and morally ambivalent Death Note.

The anime was big in North America, and the 37 episode series is to be usually found on “Ten Best” anime lists. So an American, English-language movie seemed a logical next move.

The howls of outrage still haven’t died down. The chief complaint was that Director Adam Wingard ‘whitewashed’ the story, replacing nearly all of an all-Japanese cast with Americans. (The only major character to have Japanese features was Watari, played by an American of Japanese descent, Paul Nakauchi.) The locale was changed to Seattle, and even the central character’s name was changed from Light Yagami.

My own attitude to changing the identities for a target audience is that as long as the ethnicity, nationality and race of a character aren’t germane to the plot, or as long as the story isn’t based on non-fictional characters, I’m fine with it. The whole point of acting is to pretend to be someone you are not.

Akira Kurosawa, the famed Japanese director, made three of his greatest movies from plays by William Shakespeare: Ran (King Lear), Throne of Blood (MacBeth) and The Bad Sleep Well (Hamlet). Nobody minded that he used all-Japanese casts, or that it was in Japanese. The play, and how it was told, was the thing, and the faces of the characters secondary.

The other howls centered around how the story was told. The original manga, 108 chapters, ran for well over 4,000 pages. The anime was 37 twenty-two minute episodes, and had to trim a lot from the original story. The movie runs a scant 100 minutes, so major characters and important subplots had to go.

So between the politics and the outraged fans who couldn’t comprehend why you couldn’t jam 200 minutes of exposition into a 100 minute action movie, the reviews were poor.

But the movie really does deserve better. It captured the moral ambivalence perfectly, and deftly navigated the lack of a chasm between moral, well-intentioned people and the atrocities they commit, and the painful twists and turns such lack of absolutes create among supporters and antagonists. The mood is suitably dark, with a fine and often ironic soundtrack.

It isn’t the Death Note of anime and manga, and chances are you will enjoy the movie a lot more if you just forget what you saw or read in those versions. It isn’t those versions, it can’t be, and it doesn’t try to be. It is itself, splendidly realised.

On its own, it’s a fine movie, and deserves a reception much more positive than what it received.

Now on Netflix.