If there was ever a dream team perfectly qualified to manifest this book as a motion picture, it was this duo, each of whom was well-versed in offbeat storytelling in their indie cinema endeavors. Steven Soderbergh and David Gordon Green joined forces by 2005 to serve as screenwriter and director, respectively, of a new take on this material. None of these versions of the film gained much momentum, but in the early years of the 21st century, there seemed to finally be hope that A Confederacy of Dunces would make it to the silver screen after all. Throughout the late 1990s, John Goodman was briefly tasked with playing Ignatius while Paramount Pictures picked the iconic Stephen Fry to write an adaptation. The constant presence of comedy legends who died too young in the role of Ignatius is what began to drum up a perception that this particular character was a cursed role and that, by proxy, the entire idea of a Confederacy of Dunces feature was an idea doomed to failure.Įven with this reputation, you couldn't stop Hollywood from trying its hand at a Confederacy of Dunces movie.

However, none of these made it very far, with the tragic passing of each of those comedians ensuring that the pause button would be pressed on this adaptation. From here, other notable comic legends like John Candy and Chris Farley were attached to the project in various forms. From there, his adventures take him across various forms of employment and interactions with outsized characters who could only exist in 1960s New Orleans.Īnd yet, despite the collapse of multiple iterations of the reproduction, Hollywood kept on pursuing a Confederacy of Dunces movie into the 1990s. While he fancies himself cut off from a world he despises, Reilly's mother eventually gets into a car accident, which means he must venture out into the world for employment so that he can take care of his mom. Reilly, a thirty-year-old man with a pessimistic outlook on the broader world. Its struggles to make it to bookshelves provided an eerie harbinger of the enormous and downright tragic challenges that have plagued any prospective film adaptation of this material.īefore we get into the cinematic takes on this book, though, it’s important to understand what the actual story of A Confederacy of Dunces is.

More than a decade later, Dunces was finally published and became a Pulitzer Prize-winning hit. The text wouldn’t have even seen the light of day if the mother of its author, John Kennedy Toole, hadn’t stumbled upon the manuscript after Toole’s suicide.

The novel A Confederacy of Dunces has never had an easy existence.

A confederacy of dunces book review