[In the following excerpt, Asahina criticizes Forman's directorial skills in Ragtime.]

When E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime was published a few years ago, there was much heavy-handed discussion of its fanciful mixture of fact and fiction. In retrospect, the controversy seems to have grossly exaggerated the seriousness of what actually is little more than an entertaining commercial novel with a distinctly cartoonish quality. The film adaptation, [Ragtime,] on the other hand, directed by Milos Foreman from a script by Michael Weller, exhibits precisely the pretentiousness the book was wrongly accused of, while lacking Doctorow's humor and inventiveness.

Part of the problem is time, or the dearth of it; like most novels, Ragtime contains much more than any film could cover. So some elements of the book's plot are neglected, and others are thoughtlessly retained. The subplot involving Emma Goldman, for instance, is discarded entirely, and the amazing career of Tateh (Mandy Patinkin) is presented in such a fragmented way that his progress from Lower East Side immigrant to Hollywood mogul is incomprehensible instead of incredible.

Simultaneously, Weller and Foreman waste an appalling amount of footage on the murder of Stanford White (Norman Mailer), probably because it takes place in the opulent world of the pre-World War I decadent rich, a favorite tourist attraction for nostalgic modern viewers. Perhaps to balance things out, the rest of the film, contradicting the lively spirit and experimental form of Doctorow's narrative, grimly and narrowly concentrates on the rise and fall of Coalhouse Walker Jr. (Howard E. Rollins), the mythical Black Power militant avant la lettre. The movie unintentionally makes his struggle seem foolish; so much energy is spent dramatizing his takeover of the Morgan Museum that the provocation behind his extreme protest—the vandalizing of his automobile at the hands of some bigoted volunteer firemen—is reduced, by contrast, to triviality. The moral force is thereby undermined.

From beginning to end, in fact, Ragtime is a disaster. Foreman's overstylized direction is inappropriate to the comic-strip story. As in his previous American work (such as Hair, also scripted by Weller), the Czech director seems quite out of touch with the material.