'Where The Crawdads Sing' Proves Not All Book Adaptations Are Bad
#185: "Where The Crawdads Sing," "Persuasion," "The Last Movie Stars," "The Rental"
Edition 185:
Hey movie lovers!
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In this week’s newsletter: A best-selling book adaptation that isn’t a total disaster! It’s a far better movie than the latest Jane Austen adaptation on Netflix. I’ll explain why, then recommend a really good documentary series and a fun little 90-minute Netflix movie for your weekend. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” John Boyega is so much like Denzel Washington in a new movie it’s scary.
Where The Crawdads Sing
Movie adaptations of popular books, videogames, or even stage shows, as Dear Evan Hansen learned, are almost always doomed to failure. The best you can hope for is, “it’s okay but the book was better,” and at worst you’ve put an irremovable black mark on the original property. Simply put, you cannot compete with preexisting expectations.
Luckily, I’d never read the 2018 mega best-seller Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, and in fact had never heard of it until news stories started popping up about the book’s author being questioned in a real life murder trial (which is, itself, pretty insane).
Going in with a fresh slate, the movie was simply a part rom-com, part courtroom drama set in the outer banks of North Carolina, sort of a The Notebook meets Peanut Butter Falcon.
By now, you all know the rubric for such things. On a base level, rom-coms depend on the chemistry of the romantic leads, and courtroom dramas on strength of the lawyers to deliver a strong monologue.
Check and check. Daisy Edgar-Jones dominates the movie with the kind of charismatic lead performance that 20 years ago might’ve sent her towards a Julia Roberts-like trajectory, had the movie been a box office smash. She can seemingly click with anyone, even the dreamy but bland Taylor John Smith. In the courtroom, David Strathairn plays an attorney so well I had to double check his IMDB to make sure he hadn’t played some iconic one in the past I’d forgotten.
With those boxes checked, the rest is gravy. Edgar Jones plays a girl abandoned by her family who lives alone in the marsh, only to be outcast as “the marsh girl,” making her an easy suspect when a local hero ends up dead near her home. Along one timeline, witnesses are questioned in court, lending itself to recreate a past timeline in which she comes of age and learns to make a good life for herself entirely on her own, into which comes a messy love triangle. It’s a story well-told.
The movie is strangely both propped up and anchored down by its source material. Nearly every non-Edgar Jones compliment I’d pay to the movie is a result of the original story, which created some indelible characters and carved out some effective (if a tad obvious) themes about belonging that bring the movie to its satisfying conclusion. And yet, one cannot watch this movie without seeing its seams. Intercutting different timelines and laying in reflective voice over simply works better on the page. Within the context of a movie, they make a viewer feel a half-step removed from total immersion in the story.
The most remarkable thing about this movie is how out of place it feels. It has all the makings of a classic “streaming movie,” and yet it looks and feels every bit like a big studio theater release. Considering the lack of established star power and the limited ambitions both commercially and critically, with no less than backing by major studio distribution (Sony) and a mid-sized production budget (~$24 million), this movie stands as a pretty incredible counterpoint to the “movies they don’t make anymore” category.
That’s exactly why its success — $26 million and climbing — might be an even greater sign of movies’ revival as a whole than any of the crazy blockbuster movie numbers of late. There have been way fewer nationwide box office releases this year, with the thought being that people will only come out for the giant blockbusters and spectacle movies. Yet in there competing with Thor and the Minions and what’s left of Top Gun is this little engine that could.
My hope is that maybe smaller movies with modest ambitions can carve out a place as counter-programming for the tentpole movies that come every couple of weeks, which increasingly have catered to younger and younger audiences. My thought is that, while these movies won’t impact the bottom line for the big corporations that run the studios, maybe they can operate in the black enough to be used to develop relationships with exciting young talent.
Weirdly, the most hopeful sign we (I’m speaking for us all here) can see right now is a bunch of “pretty good” movies return to theaters. Nobody has cracked the code on the miraculous alchemy that produces “great” movies, and so with more chances taken like this we’re far more likely to get some every year. That’s a future I can get behind.
Something New
Persuasion (Netflix): Jane Austen is arguably more popular now than she’s been at any time in the last 200 years, and there’s been a concerted effort in recent years to “modernize” her stories — the modern dialogue in Greta Gerwig’s awesome Little Women in 2019, the Instagram aesthetic of Anya Taylor-Joy in 2020’s Emma, or the totally reimagined Fire Island from earlier this year, but also the movies and shows that are clearly heavily influenced by Austen tropes, like Emily Mortimer’s “In Pursuit of Love” on Amazon Prime, and don’t get me started again on Enola Holmes.
But much like Theseus’ Ship, it’s hard to know at what point you’ve substituted so many modern elements that you’ve lost what made the original text special. Case and point: Dakota Johnson’s classic lovesick Austen heroine is played here as a fourth-wall breaking, wise-cracking girl boss, turning up her nose at the types of surrounding characters who populate all Austen tales, like whiny sisters and charming suitors and oppressive parents. As I’ve said many times, it’s almost impossible maintain that ironic detachment and essentially make fun of your own premise while also asking audiences to buy into it in the third act.
Johnson’s charisma makes the movie watchable, but she doesn’t have an ounce of chemistry with either end of her love triangle. I think by now we can say definitively that Henry Golding isn’t a good actor, or at least not a complex one, and Cosmo Jarvis presents such a British stiff upper-lip that he’s repressed his personality entirely, making his Wentworth character such an odd object of attraction.
This movie scratches the same itch that all Austen fans will love, which I can roughly boil down to…beautiful young women in frocks gossiping? It’s fun enough, but anyone who watches this over the 2019 Little Women, no matter how many times you might’ve seen it, needs to get checked by a doctor.
Something Old
The Last Movie Stars (2022, HBO Max): This documentary series was just released, but it’s about the lives and marriage of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, and I promise it will make you want to go back and watch a ton of Paul Newman movies (of which I give the highest recommendation for The Sting, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Cool Hand Luke, among many others).
This is such a cool premise for a documentary, directed by Ethan Hawke (the actor, who I featured recently in The Black Phone but might be best known for Training Day or the original The Purge). This trailer explains it well, but basically, before he died Paul Newman did over 100 interviews with his super famous friends to tell honest things about him for a memoir. Then he burned the tapes. But the transcriptions of the interviews survived, so Hawke casted HIS super famous friends to stand in for the originals — George Clooney as Newman, Laura Linney as Woodward, with roles for Oscar Isaac, Mark Ruffalo, Sam Rockwell, Sally Field, Billy Crudup and on and on.
Watching the first episode this week gave me goosebumps, and I can’t wait to watch the rest in the next few days.
Something to Stream
The Rental (Netflix): One of the subcategories on my Netflix feed is “90-Minute Movies,” a kind of brutal reminder by the Almighty Algorithm that my viewing decisions are often driven less by the quality of a movie or show than by how big the current void of time is I’m trying to plug when I plop down at the end of a long day. This row is made up of exclusively genre fare — comedies, rom-coms, and horror mostly — but readers of this newsletter know I have a sweet spot for “elevated” genre movies that are able to transcend the cookie-cutter tropes.
One such ascender is The Rental, the directorial debut of James Franco, starring his wife Allison Brie and, we can now add the name because he’s become America’s favorite burned-out heartthrob on The Bear, Jeremy Allen White. I think I was too harsh on the movie in my initial full review, because this movie is more interested in being an intersecting love triangles indie rather than a horror movie, and I now see that’s not really a bad thing. And even if it doesn’t entirely pay off on its terrifying premise of what if your Airbnb host was spying on you and messing with you, it’s still absolutely worth the watch for its stellar vibe.
Trailer Watch: Breaking
You’ve got to respect a movie that isn’t afraid to flat out name-drop in the trailer the movie that it’s directly ripping off. And yet, if this truly is “a modern-day Dog Day Afternoon,” sign me up — and it should be noted that isn’t the only bank robbery hostage movie I can think of off the top of my head (Den of Thieves and Ambulance come to mind).
The big thing to point out here is John Boyega, who is doing such a spot on impression of Denzel Washington in this trailer that it’s almost scary, like the first time we saw Austin Butler as Elvis. Except, Denzel has nothing to do with this movie. If someone can get an Oscar for mimicking another actor playing a character, he’s a shoe-in. Plus, the last big screen performance for the late great Michael K. Williams? It all adds up to a can’t-miss for me.