Jennings seems to have absorbed this sound advice. His filmmaking style is unrushed and -- for a film stuffed with special effects -- not overly busy, notwithstanding the Japanese schoolgirl with five torsos and one pair of knee-socked legs.
The hydra-headed schoolgirl pops up on a foggy planet, where Arthur, Ford and two other space travelers -- an easygoing Earth girl with the moniker Trillian (Zooey Deschanel) and the president of the galaxy, Zaphod Beeblebrox (a sensational Sam Rockwell, riffing on Elvis and the current President Bush) -- drop by for an atmospheric visit. This brief sojourn, which builds on a bit lifted from the second Hitchhiker book, doesn't really serve the plot, which is a relief, given that plot isn't the point. (The point of this particular episode is a patently freaky turn by John Malkovich.)
The screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick, who shares credit with Adams, has written that the novelist admitted that his first book is a story with "a long beginning and then an ending." The same is more or less true of the movie.
This narrative bagginess is partly what makes the film feel true to Adams, if not in precise letter then certainly in mellow spirit.
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