A few weeks ago, I finished Jonathan Safran Foer's novel 'Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close' which I rushed in order to ensure I completed it before the movie came out to ensure that the experiences didn't weirdly overlap. There are plenty of novels I've read after watching the movie and it's been no big deal, but I tend to prefer reading the novel first in order to avoid visualising the cast as the characters. As an aside I loved the novel, although I suspect it's not everyone's cup of tea, as well as quite liking the movie, even though it's far from the director's best (that would be 'The Hours' by a long shot). The whole experience got me to thinking how annoying I find it when I hear people complaining "the book's better than the movie" and not just because they probably mean that "the novel's better than the movie". As a further digression, a former English teacher of mine is now very happy as a resulting of me making that point. Or just not turning in his grave. Or possibly dribbling in a home somewhere and not caring either way. People confusing the book ("the physical form") and the art ("the novel") drove him spare. In fact, do you think he saw ebooks coming? Damn, that was one clever bloke. Anyway.
The obvious flaw in the comparison is of course how much it disrespects the process of adaptation as well as being deeply unfair thanks to basic differences in form. Characters' inner monologues? Not so easy to put on screen (although the recent adaptation of 'We Need To Talk About Kevin' did a fabulous job thanks to Tilda Swinton's astonishing performance). Carl Sagan's 'Contact' (which I read after I'd seen the movie) lost the crux of the personal story, which came to fruition in the last few pages and which I'm not going to spoil here, as the entire sub-plot had been excised from the movie. And yet when I thought back to the movie, I could see that there was no way to ladle it in, that the excision was entirely sensible and just what a good adaptation job had been done. The novel of 'The Last Temptation of Christ' was a densely textured, earthy, philosophical masterpiece. Martin Scorsese's movie was no less earthy and indeed no less philosophical, but the tonality & intricacy of the prose just couldn't be translated. Did the movie feel as though it was lacking anything? Not so much.
'We Need To Talk About Kevin' was a good example of one of the fundamental rules of adaptation: not being overly faithful to any particular literary conceit if it acts as too much of a constraint on the movie. In that case, the film dumped the Choderlos de Laclos-style series of letters/ interior ruminations for something that superficially felt much more conventional and yet with a slight sense of subterfuge managed to include everything that was key with attentive, subtle direction and lovely performances. An almost but not quite opposite example of this was the film of 'One Day' which insisted on keeping the basic format of the same calendar date on successive years; the problem with this was that there was so much story to get through and so little time for character detail that the actually-not-that-bad movie felt like it was hurriedly ticking boxes, rather than say skipping alternate years and giving what remained more room to breathe.
But the comparison between novel & movie is best tested with three particular examples. 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" was (imho) one of Dick's weakest novels, adding virtually nothing to his oeuvre. 'Jaws' read like a typical airport blockbuster (does anyone write novels like that any more, because they're not available in any airport I've travelled through recently?) while 'The Godfather' read like lurid pulp trash. (Sonny's manhood was so large that prostitutes used to charge him double, explaining his particular attraction to the woman he ended up with as she had a particular health issue allowing her to, um, accommodate him. No, I'm not making this up; strange how this detail didn't quite make it to the movie.) And yet Ridley Scott's movie invented an entire visual aesthetic as well as forming the basis for modern cyberpunk, Spielberg's movie is still regarded as a masterpiece thriller and Coppola's movie presented a gangster epic in the style of an opera and is still regarded as one of the greatest movies ever made. That's the ultimate problem with the idea that the movie's not as good as the novel; it's just not necessarily true.
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