As I write this, the movie version of "The Giver" is about a week away from its release. Just in the past few days I’ve learned a recently successful director has signed to do a movie version of "A Wrinkle in Time." I loved both of these books. I don't expect I will ever see either of the movies.
Too many times I've seen a great book become less because of the movie version. For example, we have Neil Gaiman’s “Coraline,” a beautifully written and legitimately scary middle grade horror story. I’ve used it as a classroom read aloud several times. The book left enough of an impression on one student that she came back to see me while in middle school, wanting to borrow the copy I read to her class so she could bring it to a Neil Gaiman reading she was attending and have him sign it for me. The movie version of “Coraline?” It had a lot to like, but I couldn’t get over a new character added for the movie, the skateboard kid with the goofy nickname who lived in the neighborhood. That kid was such an unnecessary amalgamation of stereotypical middle-grade boy traits, he all but ruined the movie for me.
So I'm cautious about movies made from books I love. “A Wrinkle in Time” was, without condition, my favorite book growing up. It was as formative for me in elementary school as Bruce Springsteen's “Born to Run” album was in high school. Between 3rd and 6th grade, I read it eleven times. I read all of the sequels, which were nice extensions of the original but did not live up to the thrill of first encountering the story. I had my own elaborate ideas of what the fantastical worlds from the story were like, even without any reasonable visual reference beyond the author’s description. I know what my versions of Meg Murry and Mrs. Whatsit and Aunt Beast and The Man with the Red Eyes and the Black Thing were like. A flash of memory still hits me now when I watch "Captain America" or "The Avengers" and hear characters referring to The Tesseract, because I first knew of that word from “A Wrinkle in Time.” Those images have become indelible parts of my DNA as a reader, and consequently as a writer. Do I want to see another interpretation, or subject myself to the chance a movie version might marginalize this book I loved so dearly? Because seriously, and I'm not saying this is going to happen, it would break my heart to see Charles Wallace break into song.
I was introduced to “The Giver” when it was being passed around through groups of teachers when it first came out. Even if it's technically young adult, a lot of elementary teachers were into it. I was assigned to read it for a children's lit class in my master’s course work, and pulled the class into a lengthy debate about how the book ends (I came prepared with highlighted moments from the text that supported my point). I’ve had a long-standing argument about how that ending with a Talent Development teacher I work with. Whenever she taught the book to the fifth graders, the kids would always split between our two opinions and I'd congratulate the ones who came to the same conclusion I did, unprompted. It's one of my favorite books, but I will never see this movie. I fear the movie version is being released now to ride the wave of recent dystopian YA books-to-movies (“The Hunger Games,” “Divergent,” etc.) even though it could be argued "The Giver" was one of the grandparents of that genre. So now in the movie Jonas is 16 instead of 12, which already disassembles a key plot point, and the trailers I've seen make it look like much more of an action/adventure plot than the book was. But my biggest fear is a movie version putting a definitive ending on the story. One of my favorite things about it was how the end was so widely open to interpretation, which has led to decade-length discussions for me, and not just about this particular book but about the roles and responsibilities of both the reader and the author in literature.
It's sad to think there could be a generation of readers who haven't experienced either of these two books yet and will get their first exposure to them as movies, only to read the novels as follow-ups to their movie experience. I think a movie can be a great way to recapture the experience of first discovering a book, but too often it’s hit or miss. I guess a lot of opinion here depends on how you're introduced to the source material. I've seen a lot of movies based on books that have been great. I’m just glad that in these two examples I got to know the stories first as books.
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