(I’m not going to put this entire post in a spoiler box, so here goes.)
—It was a grave mistake to set the film in the same year it was produced. In the opening paragraph, (you’re right, Maci, about it being one of the best) the main character says, “The night of August 12, 1967 still divides my life”. What happened between Jade and David when they were teenagers could only have happened in 1967, not earlier or later.
—The novel is a story told by a man who knows he’s ruined his life, but can do nothing except pick at the same wound. It starts out on the night of the fire for a reason: this is how David deals with adversity. From then on, it’s basically about his inability to let it go already. Everything that happens before the night that “divides” his life is told in flashback. What’s important is how he feels about their affair, not how it happened.
—But the first half of the film is about their affair, and it’s played out so badly! Five minutes of Jade walking across the room to David does not provide any insight on their characters. And the devices of showing how the affair became too intense were very trite and Afterschool Special-esqe. Jade’s dozing off in school. Yeah, I really understand her turmoil.
—And later, after they’ve been forced to cut off contact, David sees her flirting with another guy and agreeing to let him call her. Gah! It wasn’t like that! She didn’t immediately fall out of love the minute they were apart; she just wanted to be alone for a while. And of course, this serves to make David’s jealousy seem justified.
—And whose decision was it to create an artificial ending, halfway through the original storyline? In the novel, David didn’t rape Jade in the hotel room; he contrived for her to have to spend the night, during which she finally gave in to her love and desire for him (in a very explicit and somewhat gross sex scene). Then he followed her up north where they lived together for, I think, a year, and had about as healthy a relationship as he’s capable of having. Until his karmic debt came due, of course.
—We’re supposed to feel so sorry for David: a victim of circumstances and Parents Who Don’t Understand, whereas in the novel, it becomes clear pretty quick that this guy is at least a half-bubble off plumb. He cannot control his emotions, which is bad enough when things are going his way, but considering the way he approaches a problem, I wouldn’t want my daughter involved with him either.
—For instance, the whole deal with his being committed. In the novel, he was actually somewhat regretful that he didn’t go to jail, on the theory that a harsh punishment would make Jade and her family more inclined to forgive him. (I said he was whacked!) The hospital itself was not a snake pit; it was a very cushy private institution. If someone went in stable, they wouldn’t emerge as a shell of a human being.
But David wasn’t stable. He looked it, but he wasn’t. Incarceration simply didn’t affect him. The only way it was a problem for him was that it prevented him from continuing to pursue Jade. Otherwise, he was in limbo. And that scene where he’s crying and begging and tearing his hair out—I can just hear Martin Hewitt thinking “It worked for Tim Hutton! (Best Supporting for Ordinary People the previous year)”
—Brooke Shields seems to have been cast solely for her looks. At the time, she was very beautiful, although I couldn’t tell, from the crappy video copy that I saw, whether the lighting really did her justice. I’m not going to debate whether or not she could act, because it’s irrelevant: the script doesn’t offer any reason for David’s obsession with Jade except that’s she’s beautiful. And furthermore, Jade, in the novel, was not supposed to be a goddess. She was pretty, but again, the novel was set in a time when classic beauty was not valued nearly as much as…well, a “free-spirit” quality, which the character did have. And she was also blonde.
—The conflict between Jade and her parents is all wrong. In the movie, Jade is caught rifling her dad’s medicine chest looking for downers because she “can’t sleep”. He blows up and she gets hysterical, so that makes him the bad guy. But in the novel, this was a cry for help. And we only find out about this in a letter from her mom to David. Also in the novel, the parents were well aware that they were in a sexual relationship. There was no sneaking around: her parents were accomodating, to the point of getting Jade a double bed from the Salvation Army because the teens weren’t getting enough sleep crammed into a twin bed. (Again, 1967.)
The most common complaint from people who’ve seen the film is “How can her mom just stand there and watch them having sex? How bizarre and perverted!” And the way that scene plays out, it is impossible to reconcile, because we don’t know enough about the mother, and the whole family’s dynamic, to understand how that could be. When she tells the story in the novel, it does make a certain kind of sense. (For one thing, she was high…)
—The dialogue in the script alternates between mushy and frantic. But the novel was, of course, more subtle, and some lines had a lot of bite. When Jade’s mother is telling David about the night she saw them making love, she has a few words to say about their half-ass method of birth control. “And you, Jewish-radical-rock-and-roll-pothead, you didn’t even have the brains or the cunning to carry a Trojan in your wallet!” Later, when Jade and David are boarding the Greyhound to go to Stoughton, VT, where she’s been living, he’s surprised to see that the bus is so crowded. “I didn’t think so many people would be going to Stoughton.” “This bus goes a lot of places,” Jade says impatiently. “Albany, for instance. It’s just like you to think that because you’re going to Stoughton then everyone is.” (Can you tell I love this book?) Brilliant line, not least because it calls attention to David’s solipsism. But you can’t have something like that in a looooooove story; it would kill the mood!
—This was also Tom Cruise’s film debut. Which leads me to wonder what it would have been like if he had played the lead? Now, I know there are people on this board who disdain him as an actor, but I don’t want to get into that. All I’m saying is that at the time, he was at least physically matched to Shields: both fresh and young and innocent. A big problem with Hewitt is that he looks about 25. And he really can’t act. With Cruise in the lead, the film might have been a degree or two less bad. But it still wasn’t salvageable.
—James Spader is good in his role, but the character just doesn’t belong in this film. The novel, yes, but in the film, he’s just the obligatory Jerk Who Doesn’t Understand the Beauty of Their Love.
—Even the theme song, beautiful as it is, does the novel an injustice. It makes the affair seem like perfect love, when in fact, it was never perfect, because they were never satisfied. At least David wasn’t.