Did Hollywood lose the ability to adapt books into movies? Or is it the current obsession with mini-series or series of any kind that drives it to do this?
It seems to veer to extremes…you either get a giant book like The Goldfinch adapted into a 149-minute movie and everyone complains about how much was omitted or you get this 480-page novel adapted into 8 long episodes that it’s difficult to imagine omitted anything at all? In fact, this mini-series adaptation feels like they adapted every single page. On purpose. Nd then stretched it out for dramatic effect. Mind you, Netflix isn’t the only one guilty of this. HBO does the same thing. Outsider, for one, was obscenely protracted. But where HBO goes for class and style, Netflix seems to go for the cheap seats and lachrymose emotional manipulation. Netflix does it for the ladies, it seems, like a fancier version of Lifetime television. You can just see some real housewife somewhere binging this with a box of wine. Which is a shame, because if nothing else, Tony Collette deserves more. She’s a terrific talent and here she is almost isolated on a tiny acting island among the cast of ne’er-do-wells and nobodies. To be fair, the baby-faced actress who plays her daughter does a pretty good job too, but the rest of the cast are just kind of there in a way that screams “we busted our wad on the main two, the rest are budget hires”. If you read, you know of how ubiquitously popular these sorts of thrillers are – the female-driven, female-centric tales of torrid romances gone wrong, the past coming to haunt, and mother/daughter relationships. So this one is very much by the numbers sort of thriller and done fairly well at that, or at least in the way that hits all the numbers. You have your main protagonist played by Collette who has a fairly nice life: a meaningful job, a nice house in a lovely beach town, a handsome ex who, despite the ex status, remains at her beck and call and a daughter. The daughter isn’t as settled in life despite being 30. Or maybe because of being 30, millennials and all. One sunny day mother and daughter go to have a birthday lunch and get rudely interrupted by a public shooter, because, you know, America. Nd then mother goes all heroic and kills the shooter, making national news and doing something she’s been avoiding for the past 30 years – attracting attention to herself. Turns out she has a very good reason to avoid attention. And for the next eight episodes, you’ll get to find out why. The revelations will come as they are uncovered by the daughter or flashed back upon by the mother. There’s some fascinating casting for the past characters, wherein the daughter gets a perfect tiny likeness, but Toni Collette’s 22 year old self is inexplicably looking nothing like her. Remarkably so. I mean, Collette is a unique looking actress, certainly, but her younger self not only looks different facially, she’s about ½ foot shorter. This is kind of funny, because (Nick, the antagonist, naughty boy revolutionary with lamentably pubical facial hair) is also so much shorter than his 30 years older self. Between then two of them, they easily gain a foot in 30 years. Anyway, aside from that, there’s the matter of pacing. It begins at a reasonable clip and then slows itself down, noticeably, almost as if someone said, hey, hey, pace yourself, we got eight episodes to do. And slowed down, some dynamic is lost in favor of Lifetimeish meaningful looks and somber conversations. This is especially noticeable in the last few episodes. You begin to just want to get it over with and even the wide-eyed charms of Toni Collette aren’t enough. It’s Netflix, they just can’t help themselves - they’ve never met a drama they didn’t want to turn into a melodrama. Prime’s done it too, to an extent, when they turned a perfectly good Tell Me Your Secrets into a tv show instead of wrapping things up in the final episode the way they should have. Succinctness it seems no longer has a value in the binge-prone culture. Anyway, there you have it. A slowed down adaptation that it time-wise probably equivalent to an actual reading experience. Perfectly decent leisurely paced mystery thriller shot through with a heavy dose of estrogen. Get your box-wine ready.
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