No, the film can't match Musil
Actually I believe it can and does. Not as much a Musil Scholar as Denti, my field is more specified onto the book itself and its hypertextualism into film.
It is important to know, that Musil began writing T�rless partly out of boredom, partly out of the desire to write and finally because, in terms of genre, the school novel was hugely popular - I also believe that Musil chose the title to be a "play" with Goethe's "Die Leiden des jungen Werters" - because it suggests the drive and will Musil put into creating the novel, and thus also the conscious awareness of the structure and motifs.
The book has a curious structure, progessive linear in chapters, yet each chapter is mainly told in analepsis, by memories, anecdotes, observations, reflections and so on, spending the first 3rd introducing characters, its second 3rd the setup of plot and its final 3rd with the doubts of T�rless, set against the humiliations of Basini.
Important here are two passages: (1) the introductionary quote by Maeterlinck and (2) Beinbergs lecture about the Weltsehle, both directly demonstrating the books relationship with Transcendentalism. Musil pays direct homage, in terms of wordplay to Emerson's "Self Reliance", to Shaw's "Man and Superman" and to Nietzsche, and indirect homage to Baudelaire and von Hartmann.
The book is transcendentalism and as such existentialism, but also a direct critic of society. Make no mistake, this is one very important little book.
Schl�ndorrf breaks this structure up and makes it more progressive, but remains the analepsis in regards to Beinberg and Basini. What Schl�ndorff wants is to show that how as childish cruelty was accepted because it didn't collide with the mindless conformity automatically created super- and subhumans, where humilations, even torture, were tools for both discipline and future leadership, and how these in turns caused the rise of the third reich.
Where Musil always had a personal reason for punishment, does Schl�ndorff not, which makes the decay and fall of the social values, by Schl�ndorff societies democratic powerdivision, even stronger, as there need to be no reason, or as said in his defence speech, that any man can do any evil, no matter how evil, just like that, and it will be completely naturel.
While this may be a misprint, it also may not be.
Criterion states the presentation to be 1.75:1 Anamorphic, which suggests the image being cropped, as the OAR was 1.66:1,
