What is a film adaptation that you believe is actually better than the original novel—and why?
Don't get me wrong: I quite like films. I watch one every Saturday night (movie night, right?) if I'm not out and I try to go to the pictures once a week and quite often manage it. There's an independent cinema and a Regal in town, plus a bigger indie in Sacramento - which shows classics and and Live from the Met (doesn't count as a movie though) as well as interesting new releases. Then, with a bit of planning, there's also the Roxy in San Francisco.
It helps too that I don't at all mind going on my own if none of my film-watching buddies is up for my choice. The Zone of Interest was one where nobody would chum along, for instance. And Petit Maman, for very different reasons. It's kind of frustrating not to be able to pick it over after, mind you. Another drawback is in the large category of horror films too scary for all my movie-going pals but also too scary for me to watch alone. I've missed a lot of bangers because of this.
All of which is to say that my difficulty with the question this week is nothing to do with not loving films. It's just that I love books a great deal more. So even with inarguably great films - Trainspotting, The Name of the Rose, To Kill a Mockingbird - I usually prefer the book.
There's always more book, for a start*. And - Stephen King fan to my core - I think more is more. So if you see a film adapation first and enjoy it, you can scamper off to the book knowing it's going to be like the best ever director's cut.
*There's more book if the film was good, I should say, because a script adaptor has to be pretty brutal with a novel to get it down to a manageable size and still in good cinematic shape. Recently, in my opinion, the adaptor of The Thursday Murder Club didn't do this. The book was snipped and trimmed, leaving little dots of everything from the book and not enough of anything to make a good movie. Most unfortunately, one of the things that was pruned with nail scissors until it collapsed was character. It would have been much better to take an axe to a couple of sub-plots and leave a functioning film-sized whole plus a nice suprise for anyone who went from the film to the book.
My first example of a better-than-the-book film (finally!) is related to this.
The book is very short, meaning that none of it had to go to make a film work. So just about all you get from the book that you don't get from the movie is the experience of reading a book. Usually, that's enough but when the book is epistolary and the film keeps the letters but gives you Anne Bancroft's and Anthony Hopkins's voice reading them . . . even if you don't eat popcorn there's no contest.
Sense and Sensibility
Hear me out. I adore the book. I adore all six of Jane Austen's completed mature novels. I adore her juvenalia and can weep over the loss of what she was writing when she died so young. But. Emma Thompson's adaptation of S&S is a masterclass of axe-wielding. She gets rid of big characters - Lucy Steele's pointless sister, the dull Lady Middleton - and gives a purpose to Margaret Dashwood, who comes tumbling off the screen in away she never did off the page. And then there's the casting. In the book, Marianne Dashwood, put off hunks for life after coming a cropper with the scoundrel Willoughby, settles for Colonel Brandon. She does this in the film too. Only it's Alan Rickman. There's not a straight woman or gay man in the world who'd rather be coming out of that church at the end with Greg Wise.
Die Hard
And then there's Die Hard, which is in the I-didn't-know-it-was-a-book zone. It was a book. It was a workaday thriller called Nothing Last Forever by Roderick Thorp. And then, as we all know, it was the movie that changed thrillers forever. Since Die Hard, hasn't every good action thriller had humour? Since Die Hard, hasn't everyone had a Christmas movie that they love? Since Die Hard, hasn't every man who hates dressing up had a Halloween costume he's happy about? Yes.
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