Film adaptations of novels often stray far from their source material.
Due to time restraints films will often purge subplots, omit characters or merge them. All of which makes sense considering most people don’t want to sit through a 10 hour film, and most standalone novels don’t have enough plot to warrant being split into multiple parts (The Hobbit?).
What gets me is when the theme of a book is disregarded, or the plot changed so drastically that if it wasn’t for the title you wouldn’t even recognise it (I Robot, Starship Troopers).
Short stories usually allow for more faithful renditions but even then can have inexplicable changes that indicate that the film makers were cashing in on name recognition for their shitty film (The Lawnmower Man).
Of course, some books would be completely unfilmable unless changes were made. Sometimes these changes work (Naked Lunch) and sometimes they don’t.
A Scanner Darkly and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas seemed pretty much spot on to me. Both kept the spirit and the majority of scenes and characters of their source. It probably helped that both novels were very short.
Which films do you think are the most faithful to their source?
No Country for Old Men – extremely faithful, including most of the dialogue. No added characters, nothing important left out.
Also The Godfather – Coppola left out that subplot about the woman who had that special surgery, but if I remember right, the movie stayed close to the book.
Sometimes a movie will leave me with questions, usually about a character’s motivation. King’s Row is an example. The incest wasn’t entirely left out of the movie, but it was more explicit (but not graphic) in the book.
Others where the movie prompted me to read the book and I was pleased with the adaptation: The Magnificent Ambersons, Leave Her to Heaven, Alice Adams, Dodsworth, Of Human Bondage, The Missing, Therese Raquin, A Very Long Engagement, Jean deFlorette/Manon of the Spring, Stardust, The Dollmaker, Lonesome Dove, Night of the Hunter.
I found the film version of The Princess Bride to be very faithful to the book (which is my favorite book in all the world). Of course, they had to leave out some of the good parts, but the wacky and sweet spirit of the book was certainly there. William Goldman is both an accomplished novelist and an expert screenwriter, but in the hands of a less capable director this could have been a mess despite the great screenplay.
Winter’s Bone changed a few things, but not much. Same for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Reader, The Ghost [Writer] and the Harry Potter movies.
I thought the Watchmen film was a very faithful working, which is prob uncommon for graphic novel adaptations. It was the worse for it IMHO, film was quite good but pretty stodgy. Could have done with less reverence for the source material, so sort of the inverse of previous Alan Moore adaptations.
Except for being truncated & simplifying the characters of Harold Lauder & Nadine, the TV miniseries of Stephen King’s THE STAND is pretty darn close!
The 1970s BBC Louis Jourdan COUNT DRACULA & Branaugh’s FRANKENSTEIN are both close enough to the books in my estimation. (As for including all the main characters, Coppola’s DRACULA is closer to the book, but the tone is very different.)
Shaka Zulu was close enough (no official storybook though,) just basing it it on online posted accounts of Finn and Farewell, as with the James Michener novel.
They did well trimming the story down to its essentials for the film. It’s stylish, and I actually like some of the things they changed (the opening scenes in Budapest in particular). The mini series is slow and methodical, but that’s the point. And Alec Guinness is so damn perfect that it almost seems unfair to compare them.
I think Atonement the movie was very close to the book, maybe even an improvement on the book. I actually did not understand exactly what happened in the book until I saw the movie.
Aside from changing the sex of one character (!) The Andromeda Strain was astonishingly faithful to Crichton’s book. I was pretty amazed when I saw it.
There were some changes, but Gone With The Wind was also surprisingly faithful to its source. Especially surprising, considering when it was made. Not only the extraordinary length of the film, but this was an age when they tended to ameliorate plot elements to make them more palatable to the audience*. GWTW gave us the unvarnished awfulness without sugar coating. I agree that it’s a prejudiced view of the South and the Civil War, but it’s precisely reflecting the book in that – it’s the Civil War as seen through the eyes of the daughter of a plantation owner.
*Look at what they did to Frankenstein. They started with Peggy Webling’s play, not the book. Then they threw out the 19th century plot and reset it in the 20th century, then significantly changed the characters. (And they switched the First names of Victor Frankenstein and Henry Clerval. God knows why. Maybe they tested better) Then they eliminated the Monster’s attack on Henry’s bride. Then, after the film nwas done, they decided that Henry didn’t really die, after all, he survived. Then, when they needed a sequel, they decided the Monster didn’t die either. The novel, by contrast, has people being killed left and right. You almost don’t recognize it.
