BOOKS THAT BECAME MOVIES - JULY 2022

Finished re-reading Bleak House in June, & resumed watching the BBC production (2005) via my BritBox subscription (itself via Amazon Prime). Might add comments when I finish. The 2005 version is the one with Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock.

Barnum: An American Life
Robert Wilson
5/5 stars
This is the biography of the amazing PT Barnum, who ran a museum of oddities, brought life to the circus and introduced some of his most famous acts to the American public including Jenny Lind, the Swedish songstress, Jumbo, the elephant and General Tom Thumb. The author paints a wonderful picture of his life, his family, the people that surrounded him and mostly his drive to entertain people. Highly recommended!

The Atlantic has 2 articles on Persuasion & Where the Crawdads Sing that raise some issues in their movie/tv drama adaptations:

Shirley Li. The Atlantic, 07/15/2022: When a Troubling Book Gets a Hollywood Makeover. Related: Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, 07/11/2022: Where the Crawdads Sing Author Wanted for Questioning in Murder.

David Sims. The Atlantic, 07/15/2022: Netflix’s Persuasion Tries to Have It All.

Was having difficulties w/the HBOMax app, but finally got to watch The Personal History of David Copperfield all the way through. Features Dev Patel as David/aka Trotwood or Trot/aka Daisy/aka Doady Copperfield. The film's emphasis on the multiple names suggests identity may be a theme? Patel was also the lead in the recent medieval retelling of The Green Knight on Showtime. The storytelling in the Copperfield film seemed disjointed -- David's writings are scattered about on slips of scrap paper. I need to take a look at the book which I haven't read in some time; the book didn't seem so scatterbrained. Film has lots of meta stuff -- opens with David performing a reading of "his" novel in a packed theater; Dora Spenlow decides she doesn't fit into the tale & disappears. Adult David is present to witness his genesis & early boyhood. The film sets look like sets, suggesting this is a facsimile early 19th century "London." Descendants of the British Empire's conquered peoples populate the cast. Uriah Heep's mother's cakes gave me the giggles. The mood of the novel is sad; the film is more slapstick comedy at times, though unlike popular movies & films, the impressively evil stepfather Murdstone (Darren Boyd filmed to look like a giant, as is his sister, played by Gwendoline Christie, who is of course taller than average) never gets a comeuppance, while lowly Uriah Heep becomes the scapegoat for David's upbringing, his feelings of resentment for not being correctly identified as a gentleman -- true to psychological life, after all. Ben Wishaw as Uriah seems to be modeled on Burn Gorman's Guppy in the BBC Bleak House.

>5 featherbear: I had mixed feelings about this film when I saw it on first release. I liked the diverse casting and am anyway a big fan of Dev Patel. I was startled by the child David being played by Patel as a gangly teenager.
I agree that there is a slapstick element present and the emphasis is on humour with the darker side of the book somewhat sidelined or so I felt.
I suppose the 'slips of scrap paper' is some kind of comment on the way Dickens wrote his monthly or weekly instalments of his novels. Each slip had to contain the precise number of words required and he could calculate to the nth degree how many slips he would need for each instalment.

Where the Crawdads Sing
Loved the book and the movie!

>7 nrmay: I enjoyed the book and I look forward to the movie!