From books to movies… only 1 star

I almost never see a movie when it has been “based on” or “adapted from” a book I’ve previously read and enjoyed. It’s usually a supreme disappointment. There is nothing worse in entertainment, than creating a movie that doesn’t faithfully follow the story as an author intended it. When I read a book, I see the characters and settings in my imagination. They move, are alive, and become my temporary reality. The story flows (or sometimes not, depending on the author) and I can see what is happening, I follow the action- all on that little screen in my head.

When I have seen a movie after I have read the book, the characters and settings are different than I have imagined. Usually, the movie created in my head while I read is superior to the one on the silver screen. It is a disappointment to find the characters to be interpreted differently than you saw them or than you believe the author saw and subsequently wrote about them.

Two movies in particular impressed this problem on me and were the reasons I have refused since to see movies based on my favorite books. These two books are on my Sacred Shelf of 10: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco and Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson. These two books were fantastic, nearly poetic in the telling, yet the movies were awful, unfaithful representations of what I had read.

The Name of the Rose was the worst of the two, its only redeeming quality being Sean Connery in the role of Father William of Baskerville. Christian Slater was terrible as his apprentice, Adso. The labyrinthine library was so complicated and frightening in the book that once portrayed on screen become nothing more than a cheap maze in a house of fun.

Because these two movies undermined the integrity of the books, I have refused to see the movie version of a third book on my Sacred Shelf of 10- Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier. In my mind Nicole Kidman was not and never could be Ada – and so, I did not see the movie.

Perhaps that is being a book snob, but when a book has created an expectation in your mind, why dash those images and memories on the hard, jagged rocks of disappointment (or in other words, Hollywood).