From Book to Movie, Part I: A Review of The Other Boleyn Girl

This is the first of three blog reviews on recent movies, compared with their book counterparts.  Not to give away the store, but in all three instances, I felt the book was better than the movie--it differed only by how much better.  This whole exercise has made me ponder the issue of movie adaptations. (And by the way, if you’ve never seen the movie Adaptation, do rent it; it’s wonderfully clever and has hilarious asides about postmodernism, POV, and the writing process.)  Most film adaptations are so inferior to their book predecessors that I am hard pressed to think of examples the other way around.  Are there movies that improve upon the books they adapt?  The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, maybe.  Callie Khouri took an overwrought and schlocky D novel (sorry, but it’s true) and made a rather brave B film out of it.  But that is the only example I can think of, and it seems to be the one that proves the rule.  It certainly helps if you’re starting out with a rotten book—there’s no place to go but up.

The Other Boleyn Girl
Book: B
Movie: C-

I enjoyed the smutty novel The Other Boleyn Girl, a fat, satisfying yarn of sibling rivalry, palace betrayals and scheming clans.  I should have known that a two-hour movie would barely be able to contain all of the historical details that made the 660+ page tome so intriguing.  If the novel is a doublet-ripping guilty pleasure, the movie just is a mess.

I can forgive many of the necessary changes that were made to the plot, such as eliminating minor characters and accelerating the storyline so that Mary and Anne can be played by adult actors throughout. (In the book, and possibly in history, Mary was married off to William Carey when she was just twelve, and dispatched to the king’s bed not long after.)

What is harder to forgive is the movie’s total overhaul of the book’s characterizations.  All the bad guys get to remain bad, but the bad girls get a makeover.  In the book, Mary is one of the only characters we can root for, because every person around her—her parents, uncle, sister Anne and brother George—is scheming to get ahead, though George at least is an ally.  Anne in the film is almost unrecognizably human, even kind, speaking gently to her servants (would any Tudor queen have thanked her servants in that wholly American way?), showing maternal affection and concern for her daughter Elizabeth, and loving her sister Mary.  In the film, they begin as best friends whose relations are temporarily fractured by their competition for the king’s bed, but in the much more interesting book their relationship is tortured from first to last.  And in the book, their mother is one of the most calculating and ambitious members of the family, showing no love to any of her children and thinking of them only in terms of how they might push the family forward.  In the film, the mother (played by a too-little-seen Kristin Scott Thomas) is a constant, if wholly ineffectual, moral compass.

The movie takes the safe route by making nice whenever the book is more complex.  The Tinseltown version makes Anne more of a victim and Mary more of a courageous heroine than the book ever does.  At the end of the book, Mary does not plead for her sister’s life or visit Anne in prison, as in the movie, nor does she risk her own life to take care of little Elizabeth.  She wisely keeps her head down—and so is able to keep her head.  And in the movie, the incestuous incident between Anne and her brother stops short of anything really nasty, while the book darkly hints at their mutual guilt.  A whitewash all around.

My husband, who has not read the book, enjoyed the movie more than I did, and it certainly does have some merits.  Natalie Portman puts in a very credible performance as Anne, especially considering the bipolar manner in which the character is written.  The scenery is lush and the costumes are gorgeous.  But even if taken as a film in its own right, without reference to the book, too many aspects of it don’t work.  Mary’s first husband William Carey, after reluctantly turning his wife over to bed the king, entirely disappears from the movie.  At least the book has the decency to let the poor bloke die of a fever so that Mary can move on with her life.  In the movie, he just quietly vanishes and Mary remarries at the end of the story—an especially ironic editing oversight when you consider that this entire saga is about the intense difficulties of dissolving one 16th-century marriage in order to contract another.  (Henry, take notes on the ease with which this accomplished.)

Comments

[Al Hsu]

The only one I can think of that was equally excellent in both book and movie forms was The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, with the film version starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. Loved them both, especially how the film managed to portray the book's subtleties in dialogue, that often it was not what was said but what was NOT said that was so critical.

And I remember seeing an article in PW a few years ago about how movies often ruin good books but can actually improve upon bad books. I just dug it up; here's an excerpt:

"With the exceptions of, say, To Kill a Mockingbird and the recent Mystic River, I can't think of a movie that I loved as much as a book. On occasion, of course, a not very good book becomes a good movie—Bridges of Madison County, anyone? How about The Horse Whisperer?—and frankly, I think that's why: they weren't such great books in the first place, so the filmmakers had nowhere to go but up. That, and the fact that it's easier to add filmic nuance to a simplistic book than to subtract it from a complicated one."

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6290503.html

[Al Hsu]

Oh - folks have also observed that novellas often make better movie adaptations than full-length novels. Wasn't Brokeback Mountain a short story first? Are there others like that? Trying to adapt a whole novel means that filmmakers either cut out too much (some of the Harry Potter films), or on the flip side, try too reproduce things too slavishly (some of the Harry Potter films). Even a four-hour BBC adaptation of a Jane Austen novel might not do the source material justice.