Movie poster from Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson
Book-to-Movie Adaptations
The advent of summer usually means that my Pageturners groups are winding down for the year and also that things are beginning to happen at the multiplex. In the past several years, I’ve watched (literally) books that I’ve loved in book group turn into movies. But is the adaptation ever as good? With a few exceptions, I’d say that the book is almost always better. It has more time to develop plot and characters, and uses the imagination (much more powerful than any movie camera), whereas a normal length movie must lop and crop down to the bare essence of story (sometimes without seeming to mind if the resulting movie makes sense or is true to the source material).
More or Less Got It Right
Here are two book-to-movie adaptations that I’ve read with my book group that, I think, more or less got it right.
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd is a coming-of-age tale set in the Civil Rights era South. Lily, whose mother died when she was small, runs away from her abusive father with black maid Rosaleen. Looking for clues about her mother, she ends up living and working with the independent Boatwright sisters, who own a honey business. Lily finally learns about her mother and finds some outstanding maternal substitutes. The charm in the movie version is its excellent cast: Queen Latifah, Jennifer Hudson and Dakota Fanning. The movie stayed true to the novel and was a great help in envisioning the attitudes and challenges of the 1960s South.
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson was a fun read, but a little too light to generate much discussion in book group: a buttoned-up parson’s daughter ends up as social secretary to Delysia La Fosse, a flighty actress with too many suitors. Within the 24 hours of the story, Miss Pettigrew helps Delysia realize that a high lifestyle is not as valuable as true love. The book is buoyant and frothy, a fish-out-of-water tale. The movie, starring Frances McDormand as Miss Pettigrew, added dramatic weight by playing up the fact that the story is set between WWI and WWII, something that the author herself couldn’t have known when writing the tale in 1938. Both tell a good story, with different tones.
Summer Book-to-Movie Adaptations
This summer brings several book-to-movie adaptations: Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See and The Help by Kathryn Stockett. I’ve read the first two with my Pageturners groups, and The Help is on the Pageturners list for next year. I wonder how those movies will live up to their source material?
