After having Patrick Marber successfully adapt Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal, Scott Rudin is setting the scribe to adapt Heller’s latest best seller – a dysfunctional family drama that would probably see two actresses play the same role in separate timelines. Variety reports that The Believers will be a Miramax-based project. Here is the book’s synopsis:…
In 1962, at a party in London, 18 year-old Audrey Howard meets Joel Litvinoff, a prominent leftist lawyer involved with the civil rights movement who is on a short visit from the United States. Although Litvinoff is a complete stranger and more than ten years her senior, the two feel attracted to each other in some tacit way, and when Litvinoff, after they have had sex, half-seriously suggests that Audrey follow him to the United States and become his wife, she takes him up on his offer without hesitation as she feels her chance has come to break away from her unexciting life as a typist in suburban London.
Both Joel and Audrey are Jewish but were raised in non-observant families. When they start their own family in Greenwich Village, they pride themselves on being atheists and thus having to fear nothing from death or life thereafter. Audrey gives birth to two girls, Karla and Rosa, and, in addition, the couple adopt Lenny, whose mother, a left-wing radical, has to serve a long-term prison sentence. Underneath the liberal veneer, however, the Litvinoffs display many of the characteristics of a traditional family: Audrey dedicates her whole existence to supporting her husband’s legal career, turns a blind eye to the long series of affairs he embarks on, and does not oppose the patriarchal attitudes and behaviour he shows at home. For four decades, their family life develops according to their chosen socialist agenda, which has its foundation in the ambition to fight injustice, help the weak, and, generally, make the world a better place to live in.
