Sometimes art, whether it is music, writing, or a poignant movie, is just too needlessly complicated. If there’s too much going on—too many instruments, too many color patterns, too many characters to keep track of—a movie, or album, or painting, or novel might suffer from the excess of “too.” We’ve probably all seen a movie and wished it were 40 minutes shorter or read a book and thought, damn, this really could have been condensed and lost nothing.Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants is one of those books, but Richard LaGravenese’s screenplay does not suffer from the same overindulgence.Because of this, Water For Elephants is one of those few magical times when a movie is better than the book it is based on, when all the little details that generally engender people to love a book are stripped away in order to make a better product. We may lose some characters and some turns-of-phrase we loved while reading; but as a result of the streamlining, we get a story that encourages us to better believe in its characters and a plot that makes a whole lot more sense. With this said, LaGravenese and director Francis Lawrence really worked to stay true to the core of Gruen’s ideas, even if they tweaked some things. Michael Mann could learn from their abridging.
For reading 8 diffences, go HERE
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