That's the question recently posed by the Los Angeles Times. Short answer - no.
From the story...
Take, for example, this summer's "Eat Pray Love," starring Julia Roberts. The movie is based on Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir, a personal story of trying to find happiness that became wildly popular after being lauded by Oprah Winfrey. It sat on the top of bestseller lists across the land. Author Jennifer Weiner told me that, for a time, she had many copies -- everyone was giving the book as a gift.
The film version of "Eat Pray Love" took in $24 million its opening weekend -- a tally AdAge calls "satisfactory" -- but it was bested by "The Expendables," the over-the-hill tough-guy action movie. In the weeks since, the book "Eat, Pray, Love" has stayed in the top three -- respectable but not stunning. Meanwhile, the paperback of "Eat, Pray, Love" is back at the top of our nonfiction bestseller list.
Could it be that the essence of "Eat Pray Love" was not the eating, the praying and the loving -- things easy to see on screen -- but Gilbert's quest for them and her discoveries along the way? Was Gilbert's writing style -- witty and self-deprecating and brutally honest -- essential to the pleasure of the story? Are some books too internal to translate well to film? Is "Eat, Pray, Love" one of them?
1 comment:
They should have never made it into a movie. Same goes for anything ever written by Toni Morrison or Isabel Allende. You can't translate that kind of brilliance and profundity (yes, I used the word 'profundity') onto the screen.
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