Once again, Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon gets put on film, and once again, the book wins. It's not that this Hallmark Hall of Famer is really bad. It's not.
But.
Keyes' book is hard to read. It has lots of levels of humanity. You have to go back and do a page here and a page there over again. When you're done, you feel as if you accomplished something.
At least, that's how I felt.
The TV flick tries mightily to condense the multi-layered and tragic book into 90 minutes. I don't think it can be done. So much of the intellect of the book is condensed or cut free.
Matthew Modine and Kelli Williams are very talented performers, and there is some good chemistry between the handicapped "Charly" and his teacher, but the movie, by it's very nature, is rushed.
Then the movie-makers decide to have Williams throw herself at Modine. Rushed becomes phony. The sex scene, chaste as it is on the little screen, seems so contrived, so unlike Miss Kinian, that sex ruins whatever good was going on.
Maybe I would feel differently if I hadn't seen Cliff Robertson in the 1968 Oscar-winner. There, Charly attacks Kinian, and the second half of the movie has the main character going off to find himself, getting angrier and sadder by the minute.
Charly has it's flaws and so does FFA. If you were able to splice the two together--without causing your audience to feel dosed with a hallucinogen--you might have something closer to the complexity of the book.
It's a little like Charles Portis' True Grit. The remake is closer to the book, but the John Wayne movie is so darned entertaining. It's fun to compare, but if you haven't read the book, you're really missing out.
It's the same here.
But.
Keyes' book is hard to read. It has lots of levels of humanity. You have to go back and do a page here and a page there over again. When you're done, you feel as if you accomplished something.
At least, that's how I felt.
The TV flick tries mightily to condense the multi-layered and tragic book into 90 minutes. I don't think it can be done. So much of the intellect of the book is condensed or cut free.
Matthew Modine and Kelli Williams are very talented performers, and there is some good chemistry between the handicapped "Charly" and his teacher, but the movie, by it's very nature, is rushed.
Then the movie-makers decide to have Williams throw herself at Modine. Rushed becomes phony. The sex scene, chaste as it is on the little screen, seems so contrived, so unlike Miss Kinian, that sex ruins whatever good was going on.
Maybe I would feel differently if I hadn't seen Cliff Robertson in the 1968 Oscar-winner. There, Charly attacks Kinian, and the second half of the movie has the main character going off to find himself, getting angrier and sadder by the minute.
Charly has it's flaws and so does FFA. If you were able to splice the two together--without causing your audience to feel dosed with a hallucinogen--you might have something closer to the complexity of the book.
It's a little like Charles Portis' True Grit. The remake is closer to the book, but the John Wayne movie is so darned entertaining. It's fun to compare, but if you haven't read the book, you're really missing out.
It's the same here.