blog post 3 - a rant about the movie

 I’ll start by saying that I didn’t like this movie. I don’t know if the movie itself is bad, or if it’s just because I read and really liked the book. Compared to the book, the movie adaptation of Norwegian Wood falls flat and highlights the worst parts of the book, especially the manic pixie dream girl qualities of both Naoko and Midori. With both girls, many of their scenes are cut short or eliminated entirely, and we thus get much less of their back stories. They don’t stand on their own as real characters, and are instead just love interests to Watanabe, which I think does them a great disservice. Furthermore, cutting so much of these plotlines lessens the impact of the potential romance plots. An example of this is with Midori’s father in the hospital: this scene seemed very important to me in the book as a step in their relationship, yet it is entirely bypassed here and she just seems like a liar for claiming her father was in Uruguay and never elaborating further. The way Reiko is minimized so much in the movie also surprised me, and it made the ending with her and Watanabe feel very out of nowhere (even more than in the book). 

Along a similar note, the movie adaptation seems to have isolated Watanabe more than he is in the book. Side characters such as Stormtrooper and Reiko have been significantly cut out in favor of the (mediocre) romance plots, and simplifying their characters to such an extent makes them feel unnecessary. This even seems to have happened with Nagasawa—he seemed much more like a dick in the movie, when I think his character had more nuance in the book. 

The book relied a lot on Watanabe’s thoughts and inner monologue, which don’t have a clear translation into film. Without them, however, everything seems to fall flat. We are watching Watanabe’s memories, but we don’t know why they matter, and I don’t think the movie does a good enough job at making me care. It’s not like the movie was entirely terrible—I did like the way it illustrated the student protests going on—but overall I think it failed as an adaptation, and it pales in comparison to the novel. 

- Laura Hurley