Sometimes, Movies Are Better
In case you missed it, our latest Reader’s Circle book pick was The Club Dumas, by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. It made for interesting reading, and we had some good talk about it at our Thursday night meeting. I found the book mildly disappointing, though, as its author introduced a number of compelling ideas but then failed to deliver on any of them.
Dumas was adapted into a movie in 1999: The Ninth Gate, directed by Roman Polanski and starring Johnny Depp. While it’s difficult to recommend given Polanski and Depp’s off-screen behavior, I found it much more enjoyable than the book–the movie is more focused, doing away with a number of go-nowhere subplots. It got me to thinking: the rule of thumb is that the book is always better than the movie that inspires it, but what about those odd cases where the opposite is true?
The most obvious example, at least from my experience, is Jaws. I grew up a fan of Steven Spielberg’s movie, and in high school, I decided to track down the source material, a novel by Peter Benchley. While the plots are largely similar (with one big exception), the novel is shallow and sordid; not the worst read in the world, but, outside of its premise, not a memorable one. The movie, on the other hand, is an out-right classic, with Spielberg taking the story and elevating it, first as a terrifying wildlife thriller, and then to something almost mythic.
“Elevation” may be the key word here, because I could say the same for another classic movie that improved on its source: The Godfather. Mario Puzo’s original novel is, like Benchley’s, a page-turner, but it’s not a particularly deep one, and some of the subplots (wisely-excised for the movie version) are distracting and borderline absurd. The Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation is more focused on the family drama, using the visceral thrills of crime and violence as spice in a drama about how a family born of immigrants found its own way to the American Dream
If you’d like to do your own comparisons, you can check out either book or movie (or both!) from the library. Meanwhile, what are some of your favorite adaptations? And have you ever tracked down the novel that inspired a beloved movie only to be disappointed?
