Many of you may recognize this title as being a recent movie. Well it is pretty recent in Japan - I actually don't know when it was out at home. I saw this movie with Lauren over Valentine's Day weekend and albeit depressing, the movie is very well done. And the movie is alarmingly, wonderfully, very close to the book in it's portrayal - much of the dialogue for the film is actually taken directly from the pages of the novel. As with any 460 page book, it is hard to turn that into a two hour film and not leave out some details. They did a great job with hitting all the major points and showing the deep insecurities of the couple and the destructive relationship they had created, but I wanted to know WHY?!?! So that afternoon, Lauren and I went to a book store and I picked up the book. The book definitely tells you why.
I found that it was very well written and easy to fly through the pages. The story flowed nicely and gave so much background information on Frank and April Wheeler that just doesn't fit into a movie. Their neuroses and poor communication come from an extraordinarily dysfunctional childhood for April. Frank's childhood was much more conventional, except that his parents never planned to have him and he knew it from the start. Frank always felt like he was playing catch up and never quite became an adult in the eyes of his parents, which stunted his self-esteem and caused him to become a pathological liar and story teller.
The book is just as depressing, if not more so than the film, but such a dark look into the dysfunctionality of relationships that I was hooked. Anything that delves into the question of human nature and how we communicate with one another is fascinating to me on a level I cannot quite articulate. I feel like the more I know about all the ways people go wrong, the better I can be at foraging close friendships and more honest relationships.
"Our ability to measure and apportion time affords an almost endless source of comfort." I have been chewing on this sentence for a while. It's all about control; and I really wish it wasn't.
1 comment:
I thought the movie was pretty good. I will totally watch anything with Kate Winslet in it. I will, however, forgo reading the book, as while very well done, the story is too depressing for me.
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