Think back to the first time you saw a beloved book butchered on the screen.  It probably hurt to see the characters you love portrayed differently than you had always imagined them.  When some element of the plot was left out, you may have felt that the movie was lacking something vital.

 

How many times have you heard the complaint that a movie ruined a book, or that the filmmaker's departure from the book ruined the movie?  I’ve known people to walk out of certain adaptations because they just can’t handle the changes.

I’m a lover of books, so I know where people are coming from when they get angry of book-to-movie adaptations.  I’m also a lover of movies, so I tend to get defensive of the writers, directors, and actors who worked so hard to create that adaptation, even if they perceived the source work differently than I did.

It’s taken some time to reconcile these two responses: defending the book and defending the movie.  Now I’ve got a system, though.  I don’t compare the two.

It’s a hard system to stick to, obviously.  When I rented Everything is Illuminated , an adaptation of my very favorite book, I was saddened to see how much of the original story they had to leave out.  My first reaction was to dismiss the movie as worse than the book.  But when I took a step back and tried to evaluate it separately from the novel, I realized that the film had some definite strong suits!  Its portrayal of the characters was very honest and likeable.  The way that they changed the plot was surprising, but it was still an interesting story.  Plus, by leaving out the development of certain characters and storylines, those parts of the story were safe to continue developing in my mind, never polluted by images on the screen!

 

I also think of Bridget Jones's Diary.  The storyline in the first book is pretty drastically different than the way things happen in the movie, but who cares? Both versions present a hilarious account of Bridget's life, even if they don't exactly line up.  I remember thinking that the filmmakers did such a great job capturing the characters from the novel that I didn't care how they changed the plot.

 

There is a handful of reasons that I can’t dismiss a movie, even if it is terribly, terribly different from the material that inspired it.

First, a lot is dependent upon individual interpretations of the book.  Which Mr. Darcy do you remember imagining while reading Pride and Prejudice: Colin Firth or Matthew MacFadyen ?  Neither?  There’s a character that has been envisioned very differently by the filmmakers of two different movies based on the same story.  Is one of them right and the other wrong?  I don’t think so.  Part of the wonder of literature is that it allows each person who reads the text to come away with a slightly different version of the story.  I don’t want to get too reader-response-y, but it is pretty fascinating to see how different people can see different things in the same book.

Second, I always take into consideration that a book is typically the creation of one, singular author, while a movie is the interpretation of that person’s work by a team of hundreds of people.  Depending on who is fulfilling each role in the filmmaking process, the movie can turn out completely differently.  Not only is the director vital in the representation of the book, but so is the screenwriter, the costume designer, the set dresser, the lead and supporting actors, the cinematographer, and every other person the set.  Some people are more important than others in the grand scheme of things, but the point is that it is a collective group of people who create a movie.  If your favorite author is Tolkien, you have him to thank for his books, but you have a group of thousands to praise or criticize for Peter Jackson’s adaptations.

The third and final thing to remember while comparing books and movies is that they’re not the same kind of art.  There is a type of writing called ekphrastic poetry , in which the writer re-imagines a work of visual art through words.  Obviously, the two works of art are related to each other in a lot of ways: they may have the same theme, imagery, or tone, for example.  Still, one is visual and the other is on the page.  Comparisons can be made, but can you really criticize a poem for not capturing the color of the painting that inspired it?  Or can you hate it because it doesn’t show the depth of the subject’s eyes in a photograph?   The pieces are related, but they are not completely comparable.

I feel the same way about books and movies.  A movie adaptation of a book should certainly bare resemblance to the work that inspired it, but it can’t be the book.  Filmmaking and writing are incredibly different forms of art, and I can’t just dismiss one because the other was “better.”

There are certainly times when it’s appropriate to deem a movie much better or worse than its source book, but I think it’s a wise decision to let each work stand on its own as separate pieces of art.

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