About a month ago my daughter and I read together Wendy Orr's children's book Nim's Island, a charming story of a girl who lives with her eccentric widowed father on a small tropical island. Yes, I admit that part of our decision to read the book was sparked by the fact that we'd seen trailers for a movie based on it, featuring Jodie Foster and a small cast, mostly of not well-knowns. We decided to read the book before seeing the movie and found the book charming, suspenseful, wonderfully absurd, and heartfelt.
Wish I could say the same for the movie.
For years now I have been having my own private book/movie romance. Well, maybe that's not quite the way of saying it. But I often discover and fall in love with books because of the movie. I try to read the book first, but it's not always possible. Some of the wonderful books I discovered via movies were Isaak Dinisen's (aka Karen Blixen's) Out of Africa, Von Arnim's Enchanted April, Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, and Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate. I'm not even gonna get started with the Harry Potter books... Of all the books listed above, all were decidedly superior to the movie except for Like Water for Chocolate which for me lacked the power of the mother/daughter relationship that moved me so strongly in the movie.
But back to our lovely Nim. Sadly, crucial details in the book are changed, omitted, or given different weight in the movie. Not to mention, certain things are added that weren't even in the book. The overall effect is to cheapen the story-line and to dumb-down the book so that whatever the movie creators assume is "your average movie goer" will be left with a nicely wrapped up package, and plenty of humor, action, and a bit o' romance.
Here are some examples of how the movie parts ways with the book. First of all, in the book, Nim's pet friend Fred is an iguana, not a bearded dragon. The differences between these two lizards is significant. Iguanas are bigger, greener, and somewhat scarier looking than the smaller and more "cuddly" looking bearded dragon. Maybe iguanas have sharper claws, I don't know. But I imagined Fred to be bigger, with a long curving tail, and a lovely shade of tropical green...sigh...
In the book, Nim's protective motherly seal friend Selkie is constantly being torn between her love of Nim and her allegiance to the seals living in proliferation on the island and their "king" seal. The movie had one seal only, well, actually, Selkie had a film double. My daughter and I wanted more seals. We wanted more seaweed. We wanted to see the turtle lay its eggs. And where were the tropical bugs?
Early on in the book, Nim's father goes on a boating expedition to research his favorite sea creatures, plankton. Of course he gets caught in a storm and Nim is left to her own devices for several weeks. We read about her tending the gardens, taking the daily scientific measurements her dad records every day, cooking interesting things for meals, and collecting water, etc. Very little of these daily routines are shown in the movie because I guess we would find them BORING.
Instead, we get to see a huge dose of the agoraphobic Alexandra Rover, played by Jodie Foster, at her computer in her San Francisco home. In the movie she is turned into a larger than life comedic exaggeration of her character in the book. She writes novels (which Nim loves and reads) about Alex Rover, a sort of Indiana Jones-type action hero. Alex emails Nim's father for information for her novel, hence Nim and Alex connect. But Nim, like most of the world, believes Alex Rover is a man, like the hero in the books.
In the movie Alex Rover becomes an actual character, Alexandra Rover's alter ego, played by the same actor who plays Nim's father. You can guess where this is heading. Ultimately Rover goes on over to Nim's island when she realizes Nim is an eleven year-old girl living alone on this island. She has lots of agoraphobic episodes which begin to get old, and when Nim finally saves her in a sea storm and they both wash up on the island's shore, Nim sends her away when she realizes that Alex Rover is really a she and not a hero at all. This response is petty and small and completely uncharacteristic of the extremely mature and accepting Nim. Didn't happen in the book.
There are plenty of other plot twists and examples I could describe, but I'll close with the final detail which really cheapened things for me. At the end of the book, Alex decides to remain on the island as she cares for Nim very much and finds it to be a beautiful paradise for writing books. There is not the hint of a suggestion that Nim's dad and Alex will get it on. At the end of the movie the final scene is of Alex and dad holding hands while Nim prances happily in front of them at the water's edge. I loved that the book didn't find it necessary to define the relationships of the three major characters, but left things open, unique, and unresolved. That's the way life is. But in most run of the mill movies the notion of people being single, strong, and happy (or dare I even mention gay or transgender?!?!) seems to be a big no-no. Isaak Dinesen's book Out of Africa was all about Africa. The movie was all about Meryl Streep washing Robert Redford's hair.
For what it's worth, the movie Nim's Island is one of the more "wholesome" family type movies on the scene. At least they didn't change Nim's name to Nora or Selkie the seal into Dolores the dolphin. But they did take a special book and transform it into a not-so-special screenplay.
