Robert F. Funke

Man.

I really liked the book. I did. And I knew it would be a challenge to adapt. But. Jesus. I wanted to give this movie the benefit of the doubt, and I tried my darnedest.

I’m gonna give these in the order that I thought them.

1. The Lucky One trailer was the porniest thing I’ve ever seen in a theatre.

Major LOL at 1:10. Also, this does not bode well for EL&IC.

2. I’m gonna have some real problems with this kid.

People really liked Thomas Horn in this movie, and for the life of me, I don’t know why. I blame the director, Stephen Daldry, for most of the problems herein, but his use of Horn was, to me, the worst and most distracting. More power to the kid, I’m sure he’ll continue to make bank in Hollywood as all well-adjusted young gentlemen do, but let’s get one thing straight: he hurt this movie more than he helped it.

His character, Oskar Schell, is the son of a 9/11 victim, and he is borderline autistic. Jonathan Safran Foer drew an autistic child quite nicely in the book, struggling to connect with human emotions, constantly coming up with savant-ish whimsical inventions in his head. The movie, because it’s a movie and not a book, could have found ways to do this. But instead, they just lifted portions of the book (the opening voiceover which, hoo boy, was one of many voiceover issues), which took what was, in my mind, one of the nicest opening sentences to a contemporary novel, “What about a tea kettle?” and replaced it with some very in-your-face talk about burying people in underground skyscrapers because THIS MOVIE IS ABOUT TO BE ABOUT NINE ELEVEN SO GET YOUR TEARS READY.

Autistic boys do not whisperingly inflect monologues perfectly and dramatically. Autistic boys do not look EVERYONE THEY SEE in the eye, and very clearly articulate how they feel about being autistic. Child actors do that, and it’s why they’re creepy.

3. This movie was not made as a movie.

Somebody took the plot of the book, a book that, I might add, was not about plot, and traced a script over it. The narration of the book was good, we’ll just lay it on as voiceover. The imagery of the book was good, we’ll find ways to work it in, even if it’s not set up nicely.

4. If this movie tries to make me cry about 9/11 one more time, I’m going to sue it for sexual harassment.

I remember in high school when teachers were trying to explain to us what sexual harassment was, and there was a tricky grey area regarding asking a girl several times in a row, without ever getting a “yes.”

This movie manages to work like fourteen different scenes of people staring at the burning World Trade Center, with a sappy score overtop, PRAYING that one of them will have the audience in tears. I have a problem with this. First of all, at no point in the book is there a reenactment of 9/11. At no point are people staring out of their windows, with Foer rubbing his hands together at his typewriter, thinking, “THIS’LL GET EM.” And yet that’s the feeling you get with this movie. Where there’s a failure to get emotional heft out of the script, we get these long, hesitating sighs, combined with shots of the towers.

David Foster Wallace, I believe in an essay about David Lynch, talked about how refreshing Lynch movies were, because they didn’t “fumble for your emotions like teens to a bra strap.” This movie did so, and they didn’t get it on the third or fourth try, and I was really out of the mood.

5. CGI plummeting Tom Hanks = ballgame.

The climax of the movie is sort of an anticlimax. That which Oscar has been looking for is, we all know, trivial. But the script needs something BIG to happen. So there’s a shot of Oscar, a LITTLE BOY, sleeping alone on a subway train (“someone is going to rape that boy.” -everyone in the theater), and he has a dream that’s like a 2 second shot of a CGI’d TOM HANKS FALLING TO HIS DEATH AS HE’S PRESUMABLY JUMPED FROM THE HUNDREDTH FLOOR OF THE TWIN TOWERS. HE’S YELLING AND YOU SEE HIS FACE JUST BEFORE HE’S SMASHED INTO THE PAVEMENT. The movie lost all benefits of the doubt and became a tacky, tasteless, exploitative piece of camp, and I was ready to leave.

I didn’t want to hate this movie. But it was unsubtle and uncreative, for a book that was endlessly nuanced and creative. Some things just don’t need to be made into movies. And some, when they are, need to be done by someone who can match the original author’s creativity, not merely try to approximate it.

I just realized you can OWN a book for the price of SEEING a movie.