Somerset maugham short stories movies movie#
We could also say: the movie is plot-based: things happen, more things happen, more things happen, the end. The book is about a personal struggle to redeem oneself in the face of hardship. These differences between the original book and the movie might seem small, but they completely change the whole meaning of the story. It doesn't have the 'let's make up and everything is forgotten' element, it shows how difficult life and human relationships are and the book does much more justice to these difficulties and the struggle to overcome them. Following Kitty from inside her head, makes the reader feel that change and growth cannot be simply be 'thought', that it is hard to not fall back in patterns we despise but which are so normal to us. The book on the other hand is much more human, much more real. It is nice to watch romantic scenes in a beautiful settings, sure, but it's very much unreal. Instead, in the movie, much more conventional and boring, predictive patterns of 'love concurs all' and 'you can change your life anytime you want to' are shown.
The main transformational moment for Kitty is completely left out of the movie. The book is far superior here, with a much more progressive ending than the movie gives us. But the lingering is done as an atmosphere, we get to see beautiful shots of China, but we don't get the lingering frustration that the book so beautifully transmits. This lingering, this pausing, this internal process is not completely lost in the movie. It is always Kitty - although Kitty doesn't like herself through many pages, and as readers we gladly agree with her on that point. As a reader, we don't get to ask ourselves what we think, whose side of this struggle we are on, who is the rational one. Kitty's arc, her growth during these difficult times is all of a sudden the central aim of the book. This lingering on thought, on inactivity and of immersing oneself in emotions, as Kitty does in the book, makes for a very interesting read. But I was very surprised and glad to see how the book doesn't need all that. Precisely because we get to follow Walter, we get to see much more action, more politics, more adventure you could say. But perhaps it is much harder, and it would be a very different kind of movie. His work, his experiments, his encounter with Chinese officials, his inventions to try to save a Chinese village from a Cholera epidemic.Ī movie can also be made as a third-person-limited, the audience also seeing everything through the eyes of the protagonist, as is done in the book. In the movie this feeling is portrayed very well, but as audience of the movie, we do get to see what Walter does. In the book we hardly get to know what Walter does during the day, because he doesn't talk about it, which is part of Kitty's frustration, her inability to get to know her husband. In the movie we also follow Walter Fane, Kitty's husband (played by Edward Norton) and you could say they are both equally important in the movie. We get to know her, and the story line plays out purely from her point of view. The book is all about Kitty Fane (played by Naomi Watts in the movie), the female protagonist, whose thoughts and actions we follow throughout the book. Part of these differences have to do with the perspective the movie takes. They put in a lot of extra scenes, a political angle and a completely different ending.
But after a certain point I realised that the movie did take a lot of liberty, and possibly understandable. It is witty, nicely paced, introspective. In the beginning I was truly enjoying the writing a lot, chuckling every now and then to read some of the lines I recognised from the movie. Book vs MovieĮven though I loved the movie, the book is SO much better. But I decided I should finally take the risk. And perhaps destroy my love for the movie. I decided this would be the perfect moment, travelling to Shanghai, 15 hours in a plane, to finally read the book 'The Painted Veil', first published in 1925, as it is set mostly in Hong Kong and China. And then I came across William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965). You could say I really love the movie.īut as I was preparing to travel to Shanghai ( see the post I wrote about it) I checked out which authors I might have known had lived in Shanghai, or China in general. So often, that I often quote it to myself, or think about certain scenes as I am reminded by them because of small details in my daily life.
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