Nancy's Reads & Reels: Book to Movie

The Help, Sarah’s Key, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, are among the movies made from books this year. I read them all and have seen three of the four.

The Help movie did a good job in portraying the different characters. Viola Davis as Aibileen Clark and Octavia Spencer as Minny Jackson were outstanding.

I haven’t seen Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, but reviewers have found it wanting. It’s now available from Netflix, so I’ll get to it eventually.

I read Sarah’s Key when it came out in paperback and had forgotten parts of it, other than the basic story.Walking out of the theatre, I heard people comment that they also had forgotten parts of it. 

The Holocaust is so filled with drama and so much has been written about it but still the author of  Sarah’s Key, Tatiana de Rosnay, reminds us that the French were collaborators — not all the French, but in the Vel d’Hiv it was the French police who rounded up the Jews and sent them off to the camps.

Another book about life in France during World War II is Suite Francaise, which The New York Times called stunning.  I have to agree and it’s one book I want to go back and read again.  The author Irene Nemirousky died at Auschwitz in 1942. I have heard of no plans for a movie. The back-story concerning the discovery of the manuscript and subsequent publication is fascinating — but I digress.

Back to book to movie. I found The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo a bit disappointing. I remembered quite a few details but the main characters (Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander and Daniel Craig as the journalist) were just not how I pictured them when reading the book. I’ll watch the Swedish version and maybe like it better.