Academy Award Nominees in Print
I made a serious miscalculation in my pre-Academy Awards reading priorities. I still can’t believe Revolutionary Road didn’t get nominated for Best Picture or for either major acting award, but I started the Richard Yates novel a couple of days before the Oscar nominations were announced and couldn’t put it down anyway.
The novel, as anyone who has seen the movie trailer will surmise, is filled with tense scenes of suburban misery and despair (much like My Bloody Valentine in 3D but with the graphic violence strictly limited to the dialogue). From my current address in the heart of Suburban OKC, I could certainly recognize some of the factors that caused the 1961 novel’s characters to question their identities and the value of their existence. I’ve already noted the criminal shortage of bookstores around here, for one thing.
New Yorker critic James Wood revisits the novel in this interesting piece, and the entertainingly irascible Christopher Hitchens discusses it and “The Suburbs of Our Discontent” in this Atlantic Monthly article.
In order to catch up with the Best Picture nominees adapted from books, I should have tried harder to scrape the “Oprah’s Book Club” sticker off my used copy of The Reader. If only I had noticed the blurb on the back cover heralding its “coiled eroticism,” I may have made it more of an immediate priority, but it is next on my list.
As for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, I was excited to find the entire text of the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story online, and it made for a quick and interesting read before I checked out the movie. Fitzgerald’s story is pretty loosely adapted for the purposes of the film and the time period is necessarily different, but its twisted fairy-tale qualities make it well-worth checking out.
Before watching the end credits, I hadn’t been aware that the amazing Slumdog Millionaire had been adapted from a book as well. Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup’s novel, originally titled Q & A, was greatly streamlined for film purposes, but the general outline of the story is the same. Interestingly, unlike the film, the novel’s protagonist was named Ram Mohammad Thomas, an attempt by the author to create an Indian everyman who could be seen as Hindu, Muslim, or Christian.
This Guardian UK profile of the author describes the origins of the novel and the adaptation choices made by the filmmakers. Thanks to the popularity of the film and its impressive haul of nominations and awards, the novel has since been re-released with the same title as the film. This Sunday Times audio interview with the author touches on the film’s success and the universal themes that have seen its story resonate across cultural boundaries.
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Comments
You’re so right — sometimes it’s just a no-win situation.
It especially sucks when you’ve actually read a book, and then years later a movie is made, and then the crappy movie almost destroys fond memories of the book. I’m thinking of the Harry Potter movies, which I really wish JK Rowling had held off until the whole book series was finished so readers could preserve their mental images of the characters and scenes. Instead, I was stuck with the sniveling, whiny image of the actor who plays my favorite character, Ron Weasley, who in the books isn’t one-tenth as much of a tool.
As you said, once you’ve seen the movie, it’s extra-hard to go back and pick up the book. For me it takes a pretty special movie to make me want to go down that road — Fight Club, The English Patient, and The Hours are three I can think of where both experiences were about equally cool.
I’m still bitter about those Potter movies, though!
Recently, my husband was going on and on about how cool Inkheart looked and I was like, ‘yeah you should read the book.’
Blank stare. Followed by the response, “but why? cause now it’s a movie.”
Luckily Inkheart has Brandon Frasier which Cornelia Funke said she actually pictured when writing his character and uh, other assets, so I’m not fighting too hard on that one.
[...] Jet made some really interesting comments here about the weird interactions between novels and the movies adapted from them. It’s made [...]
Chris, people can just set themselves up for a bad time at the movies by reading the books first! (LOL) As you know, the book is almost always better than the movie. I say “almost” because I thought the movie of Michael Cunningham’s “The Hours” was as good as the book. Of course, it was a small book, and that probably helped the transition. It wasn’t like David Lynch trying to distill Herbert’s “Dune” into some kind of coherent cinematic experience.
Also, once I’ve seen a movie, I’m less likely to pick up the book since I know how it ends. I can’t win!
– Reggie the pot-stirrer