Adapted from the novel Father of Frankenstein by Christopher Bram
Upon returning home from the hospital after a stroke, James Whale, a retired director best remembered for his monster films including Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, finds himself losing his grasp on reality and haunted by memories of his carefully buried past. One of the few things keeping him in the present is Clay Boone, a former marine now working as Whale's gardener. The two very different men develop a strange and unlikely relationship.
For the most part, this was a very consistent adaptation. Most of the dialogue was taken directly from the book, and the characters all behaved almost exactly as they were described. Whale has more and longer flashbacks in the book, but the movie keeps enough of them to get the point across. In the book, a flashback generally took an entire chapter, whereas in the movie they're often just a few seconds, but if done right a few seconds of film can be just as powerful as several pages of novel, and that was definitely the case here. James and Clay reveal quite a bit about themselves to each other in the book, but they reveal even more in the movie because there wasn't really any other way to convey their thoughts to the audience. For example, in the book, the narrator tells us fairly early on that Clay's appendix burst while he was still at Camp Pendleton, resulting in a medical discharge from the marines before he really had time to serve. Book Clay never tells Whale this, allowing the former director to believe that he fought in Korea, but movie Clay does tell him toward the end, because the audience had no way of knowing this otherwise.
While I feel like most changes were necessary due to the change in medium, there were two major unnecessary changes I noticed, one of which I really liked, and the other of which I really didn't. The change I liked was the epilogue that the movie added, showing Clay several years later. That was sweet, and emphasized how much the events of the story impacted Clay's future. But what I didn't like was that the movie changed Whale's housekeeper from a Mexican woman named Maria into a European woman named Hanna. Beyond the change of race and nationality, the two women had pretty much the exact same lines and exact same attitude, but this change bothered me because there was literally no reason to take the one character of color and make her white, but they did it anyway. If this was an isolated incident it wouldn't be a big deal, but seeing this right after watching what L.A. Confidential did to Inez Soto, and knowing that Hollywood whitewashing still happens all the time, just made me angry. Overall, though, I'd categorize this as a faithful adaptation of a story that I didn't love, but am not sorry I had the excuse to read and watch.
The Oscars are tomorrow, and even though I haven't seen it I'm low-key rooting for A Star Is Born to win in this category because I think it would be fun to watch all four versions back to back and blog about them. But I think I'll be fine with whatever wins, unlike last year (NOT looking forward to Call Me By Your Name). I still have a little ways to go before I'm caught up, but I should definitely make it before next year's ceremony, so that's exciting. Thank you to all 5 of you who have stuck with me through my longest blogging project yet. My next step is to finish off the 1990s with The Cider House Rules, based on the novel by John Irving.
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