My Favorite Novel Became a Movie! So Why Am I Angry?

We tend to avoid film reviews on this site. There's no set rule, but so many other sites cover film reviews that we just didn't feel like worrying about it.

That being said, we also have an obsession with Jonathan Safran Foer, who is the best young writer around these days. If I had to pick my favorite novel, Foer's Everything Is Illuminated would be it without hesitation.

And recently, Everything Is Illuminated was turned into "Everything Is Illuminated: The Movie!"

The event of having your favorite novel turned into a film is, despite almost universal disappointment, initially special. It has only happened one other time in my life, when my childhood favorite, Redwall, was turned into an animated feature. The release of that film, however, came eight or nine years too late. By the time I caught "Redwall" on television, I was astonished at the awful animation, one of the final shattered illusions of youth. The Redwall books are amazing, they made me want to write and to read, and here I was watching them turned into animation that would've made Steamboat Willie cringe. Seeing Matthias the mouse swing a sword on the big screen seemed the equivalent of watching Shawon, my first gerbil and symbol of child hood, hanged from an eight-inch rope, his tender neck snapped in submission.

Shawon, incidentally, was named after cannon-armed Chicago Cubs shortstop Shawon Dunston, my favorite baseball player of all-time.

The point is, having your favorite book milked and sliced and hammered onto the big screen is nearly always a heartbreaking experience.

I say "nearly" because some books work as films. Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club was one such book, a novel that worked well as a movie in the hands of a skilled director, in that case, David Fincher. Despite constant disappointment, however, we still hold to hope that the book that we loved will be accorded the same care.

To be fair, Everything is Illuminated is a difficult feat. The book is divided into three sections, and bringing the perspective of each to a brief, by comparison, film is a difficult undertaking. For the first 45 minutes to an hour, director Liev Schreiber succeeds, laying out Jonathan's introduction to Alex, his interpreter, and Alex's grandfather, his driver, with detail and caution.

Not much later, however, the film falls apart for anyone familiar with the book, and not long after that, the film fall apart for strangers to the novel as well. I tried to watch the movie without the book as a reference, but when Schreiber eschews one of the novel's most powerful moments, neutering the tension when it could've easily worked, I lost all hope. (Hint: the scene I speak of is very proximal to the photo shown above.) From then on, the film is filled with such frustration: characters removed, other characters added to, even aspects of the film being completely made up. Many of these problems were due to time, I'm sure, but some were unforgivable.

Foer actually had a cameo in the movie, playing a leaf-blowing gardener as Elijah Wood's character (also named Jonathan Safran Foer) stands at his grandfather's grave, and Schreiber obviously cared enough about the story to undertake the role of director, so why didn't the movie succeed? Are studio executives to blame?

One thing could be said for the movie, though, and it's something that typically can't be said for other page-to-celluloid projects. I'll turn it into a movie poster quote. Feel free, studio execs, to use this on the DVD cover:

"You could see this movie and still be incredibly surprised and moved by the novel!"
-Jordan Green, The Burnside Writer's Collective

(Author's note: I know it's breaking the rules of writing, but I need to explain that my gerbil, Shawon, was not hanged. The hanging was merely a metaphor for the death of childhood. In reality, I unintentionally broke the tiny beast's neck when my knee landed on him. He flopped in the air twice, but I believe he died quickly. I don't like to talk about it.)