Enjoy!
There are few braver people in the world than those who accompany an avid reader to a movie based on a book the reader has read and loved. This unknowing act of bravery may start with the reader perfectly calm, even conversational on the drive to the theater. Standing in line for tickets, they may show signs of bubbly excitement, chatting about all the qualities that made the book so enjoyable and intellectually stimulating. The courage that goes into this won’t become apparent until the movie is half-over and the avid reader is sitting in their seat, white-knuckling the armrests, clenching their teeth, and sqeezing their eyes shut against the story that plays out on the screen before them. The reader may leave the theater in sullen silence, their formerly happy expression having melted into a seemingly permanent frown. The silence may go on for some time. The brave friend may even become a bit concerned. However, they should be thankful for every moment their friend is able to keep their mouth shut because as soon as they are prompted to speak, an outpouring like a tidal wave will spill forth as they talk a mile a minute, barly pausing to take a breath, listing every difference between the book and the movie they can possibly think of and asserting their firm belief that the filmmaker is the devil. If you’ve ever found yourself in this situation then you probably know that it’s better to abort any attempt at reasoning with your reader friend only because the closest thing to a response you’re likely to get is a nasty, “You don’t understand! You’ve never read the book!”
Which is mostly true (unless, of course, you have read the book...). It’s a difficult thing for someone who goes to see a movie without first having read the book on which it was based to understand the annoyance and bitterness of one who holds that book close to their heart (maybe a little too close). After all, from where you were sitting, it wasn’t a bad movie at all. The plot kept you on the edge of your seat, the characters were intriguing, you never even saw the end coming! Heck, you’re thinking maybe you’ll go out and buy yourself a copy of the book one of these days. When you do, it will become apparent just how different the movie and the book are. The plot in the book is also exciting but it’s not really the same. It’s a little bit slower and a lot more involved. In fact, whole chunks were left out during the movie and parts that were in the movie don’t even make an appearance in the book. The characters are also a little different. This character was a lot funnier in the movie, this one was much more major to the plot of the movie than he was to the plot of the book, this one wasn’t even in the movie. The book doesn’t even end the same way. It’s become apparent what your reader friend was talking about when you left the theater that day. After all, the changes are all there. However, it hardly seems worth having a hissy fit over. In fact, you may even think the changes the filmmakers decided to make to the story improved it rather than hurt it.
It’s fine to think that. Just don’t mention it to that friend of yours to whom the sacred plot of this book has been butchered, their favorite characters murdered. Though story interpretation is a big part of bringing a beloved novel to the silver screen, they aren’t always wrong to feel the way they do. Granted, there is a fine line between nitpicking and actual issues the movie has in terms of staying true to the book. Those Harry Potter fans who feel wronged by the fact that the child actor playing the young wizard had blue eyes rather than green are pushing it a little too far. There are more real issues to think about here.
One of them being the movie plot that just wasn’t quite the same as the one that originated in black print on a bunch of white pages stuffed between two covers. To the reader, these changes to the plot can either be of a relatively neglible nature or the ultimate blasphemy, particulary when it is the end that is affected by the director’s desire to interpret. The truth is that the job of the movie isn’t to include every little thing that happens in the book but to choose the highlights of the story and add a few things to make them worth telling on screen. The biggest problem with this comes in when these so-called highlights of the novel are the wrong pieces of the story altogether and those few things that were added to make it more worth telling made things worse rather than better. Maybe those scenes in the book were boring to you and deserved to be left out of the movie in favor of the more exciting ones the director chose to add, but to the reader they offer poignant insights into the plot and characters and of all the scenes that were left on the cutting room floor, deserved this fate the least. Without them, the reader feels you cannot truly understand why certain things events in the story play out the way they do and those scenes that were added certainly don’t explain any of it.
Even more irksome is when it’s not just a few scenes here and there that are forgotten but when entire sections of the book are simply gone without a trace, most commonly (or at least most noticeably) when the book covers a number of years but the movie chooses not to venture that far into the future of the characters. The Cider House Rules is a novel by John Irving that covers the life of the main character, Homer Wells from the time he is a baby in the orphanage under the care of Dr. Larch until he is a middle-aged man with a child of his own. In the movie, which stars Tobey Maguire as Homer, the character’s childhood is not forgotten but Homer himself never makes it past his early twenties. Marc Behm’s Eye of the Beholder, a novel which centers around a nameless man (known throughout only as the Eye) and his pursuit of a female serial killer with whom he has become dangerously obsessed, suffers much the same fate. In the book, the Eye’s odyssey lasts from the time the Eye is a man who is perhaps in his late thirties at the youngest until he is old enough to be having a conversation with a priest while he waits to die of old age. The more recent movie version of this story portrays the Eye, who is played by Ewan McGregor, as a man who is perhaps in his late twenties at the oldest. His pursuit of the mysterious Joanna Eris does not span the decades as it does in the book, but instead lasts only a year or two at the most. It’s also worth mentioning the movie adaptation of The NeverEnding Story by Michael Ende. The first in what has become a trilogy of movies is by far the most accurate of the three (in fact, it’s the only one that really has anything to do with the book) but it ends in the middle of the story. It covers perhaps a hundred and fifty pages of a novel that is just shy of four hundred pages in length. The sequel makes an attempt at telling the rest of the story but does it so poorly that it hardly has anything to do with the book on which it is supposedly based.
This cutting up of the plot is an unfortunate occurrence not only because it annoys the devoted reader, it also means that those not interested in wading their way through the book version are missing a lot of the story that the reader so enjoyed.
Another common error made by filmmakers eager to offer up their own interpretation of the story has to do with the loss of the story’s theme. Stephen King’s titanic novel, The Stand, was made into a three-part, six-hour long television mini-series in 1994. Even with the length of this movie, it’s inevitable that much of the eleven hundred paged book was left out. The result was a movie that focused as much as it could on special effects and the action/adventure aspect of a world devastated by a flu epidemic and the ensuing battle between the two factions of good and evil that are left after the plague. It was impossible for the movie to have gone as deep as the book did into the themes of dark Christianity behind all of this, but it didn’t have to forget it completely. There is much sacrifice made by several of the main characters, but from the movie it’s hard to understand why that sacrifice is so important. Characters find themselves turning against each other but it’s never explained why these characters do what they do. It’s certainly not an easy inference to make from what the viewer is shown. The movie just doesn’t seem interested in taking it to a deeper level that even resembles the level that Stephen King took it to in the novel. An interesting fact considering it was Stephen King who wrote the teleplay for the movie.
The Mists of Avalon is another unfortunate victim of a lost theme. Another lengthy story, this one stretches itself over nine hundred pages. Like the Stand, it was turned into a television mini-series that aired in 2001 (this one two parts lasting about four hours). The loss of theme in this adaptation is much more obvious only because it seems a far worse insult than the changes the Stand underwent. Perhaps this is because the author, Marion Zimmer Bradley, died before the movie was made and therefore was not given the same opportunity to put in her two cents. Maybe if she had been around, the filmmakers would have focused more on the complicated struggle between the flourishing Christian church and the fading Avalon as it is exhibited through the relationships between the characters of the Arthurian legends and less on the unusual sexual situations portrayed in the book. While the book hardly lets its more risque scenes pass without comment, it does not dwell on them in quite the same way as the movie does. Oddly, the movie spends a great deal of time on them without quite seeming to know why. Once the sex scenes are over, the moviemakers seem at a loss as to what it’s all supposed to mean mostly because they have chosen to almost completely ignore the bigger issue of the book--that of the slow death of a religion many of the main characters are trying so hard to keep alive. Any reader of the book is forced to ask the question: why did the filmmakers even bother? Did they even read the book or were they just directed to the “good parts” by friends? Who knows?
Other smaller offenses of this nature are found in a number of movies based on books. The makers of the NeverEnding Story trilogy chose to forgo the author’s original point of appealing to the child in us all in order to focus mainly on making the story one meant for children only. Those responsible for bringing Frank McCourt’s memoir Angela's Ashes to the silver screen chose to show the grimness of the man’s childhood but somewhere along the way forgot to include the humor and forgiveness with which he chooses to tell the story. Would it hurt to have included these things? Probably not. But those who make the movies have the power to interpret the stories any way they wish. Readers find themselves helpless to do anything about it and this is a source of great frustration.
Another losing battle comes with characters. In his introduction to the complete and uncut version of The Stand, Stephen King addresses a rumor that the novel will be made into a movie with a shrug and some speculation as to who would play each character in the movie if he had his way. He concludes by saying: “In the end, I think it’s perhaps best for Stu, Larry, Glen, Frannie, Ralph, Tom Cullen, Lloyd and that dark fellow to belong to the reader, who will visualize them through the lens of imagination in a vivid and constantly changing way no camera can duplicate.” When The Stand was finally made into a movie, a few years after he wrote this, the main disappointment for the many to whom this book meant so much was not in the loss of theme but in the casting and portrayal of the characters. Stephen King wrote the teleplay which seemed to make an attempt at staying as true to the characters as possible (and not completely succeeding), but when it came time to actually cast actors in the roles of those characters, it would be a miracle if he wasn’t drugged during the entire process. He did make one specific request and that was that the actor chosen to play the role of Larry Underwood really could play the guitar in real life. This request was fulfilled when Adam Storke won the role of the up-and-coming musician whose career is ruined by the plague that decimates three-quarters of the population. Despite his obviously exaggerated New York City accent, he was one of the better actors cast in the movie, as were Gary Sinise in the role of Stu Redman, Miguel Ferrer as Lloyd Henreid, Bill Fagerbakke as Tom Cullen and Ruby Dee as Mother Abagail. More of a surprise than a disappointment, many fans complained that Rob Lowe was not the right actor to play the handicapped Nick Andros who, in the book, is a much younger man (though it’s worth noting that Rob Lowe did an exceptional job playing the character, who is both deaf and mute). Some thought that Jamey Sheridan, who was given the role of the Dark Man himself, Randall Flagg, was too cartoonish to have the same effect the character has in the book. The major disasters, however, are in Molly Ringwald and Corin Nemec who play Frannie Goldsmith and Harold Lauder respectively. In the book, readers found Frannie to be a strong woman willing to stand up for herself and those she cares about while in the movie she was reduced to a whiner too busy being pretty to have any real impact on the plot. Harold turned from an intelligent, bitter and generally misunderstood young man into a stereotypical nerdball with no real reasons for why he does what he does. Laura San Giacomo was chosen for the role of Nadine Cross and lacks completely the strength and mother-like disposition she possessed (and, in the end, lost) in the novel. The meaning these characters held in the book is completely lost in a way that should never have been allowed to happen.
Trainspotting is a less obvious example of character portrayal that didn’t quite live up to what it was in the book. Originally a novel by Irvine Welsh, the movie version was made in 1996 with Ewan McGregor in the starring role of Mark Renton and several other actors cast in the roles of his fellow slacker junkies, Sick Boy, Spud, Tommy, Swanny and Begbie. Already alarm bells are going off in the heads of those who are devoted fans of the book. First of all, the story is told from a rotating point of view. Characters take turn narrating the story and while Mark Renton is one of the more interesting of the narrators, he is far from being the star of the story (though on more than one occasion he manages to completely steal the scene). Also, of all those characters who take turns narrating the story, only a handful of them are included in the movie and some of them are given roles that are much reduced in size compared to the ones they played in the book. Swanny, for example, hardly even has a name in the movie (he is referred to once or twice and even then it’s only by his other nickname, “Mother Superior”) despite the fact that the narration is given to him on more than one occasion in the book. It seems unfair that some of the colorful cast of characters Irvine Welsh includes in his story are left out completely seeing as how their narratives all add something to the picture of the lifestyle of a bunch of Scottish heroin junkies whose lives are controlled by their drug of choice. Rather than focus on the whole picture, the moviemakers have chosen to include only a small corner of it and zero in on one character in particular. Even then the character is changed from the one in the book. Though Mark Renton has lost none of the wit and intelligence he possesses in the book, the movie chooses to leave out that which makes him an interesting character in the first place: his past. There is not even the slightest mention of his brothers whose respective deaths affect him greatly. The fact that he once went to university but elected to drop out is never covered in the movie. Perhaps the director was too afraid of making him seem sympathetic when he wanted more to make him seem cool, self-assured and blunt when he is hardly any of these things in the novel. It’s a hard change for a reader to deal with.
There are a myriad of other movies who are victims of bad character portrayal whether it be bad casting (Julianna Margulies’s Morgaine in the Mists of Avalon suffers the same fate as the Stand’s Frannie Goldsmith) or characters that are simply forgotten (Eponine, an important character in Victor Hugo’s novel Les Miserables did not make so much as an appearance in the most recent movie version of the story; Tom Bombadil, a character who plays a small but pivotal role in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, has been written out of the upcoming movies completely, leaving fans everywhere wondering how the heck those hobbits are going to get out of the forest*). It’s one of the most unfair downfalls of all when it comes to movies based on books and certainly the saddest. It’s hard to watch a character that worked their way into your heart while reading the book be reduced to something less than what they are by filmmakers that just don’t even seem to care.
In all fairness, it must be said that none of the movies mentioned are necessarily bad movies. Nor are any movies that are based on books for that matter. It’s just that a devoted reader who holds certain stories close to their heart can’t help but take all these changes personally. Their bitterness stems from the fact that those not so inclined to trudge their way through the novel will never get the full picture of who these characters are and what their story is all about. Even still, as Mr. Coreander told Bastian in the novel version of the NeverEnding Story, there are many doors to that place of fiction and fantasy. Not all of them are books. It’s up to you to figure out which door is right for you.