Characters that are impossible to translate to film/tv

[emelee]

Have you ever seen a specific character that originated in a novel that someone later tried to "translate" ---  i.e. making a movie or tv-series of the novel with the character in them --- that you felt was translated awfully to that movie or series? 

Where the character is a thousand times better in the novel than in any film or series where he or she appeared?

 

For me, it's police detective Evert Bäckström from Leif G.W. Persson's crime novels. He's a confidant person who thinks he's always right and won't listen to reason. He's an a-hole and doesn't care. And most of all, he's not very good at his job. Sometimes horribly bad due to prejudice or homophobia etc. But he's also sly, using people to get what he wants. He mostly got his job because of nepotism. 

 

American network FOX tried to do a series with him (Backstrom). There have been mini-series done with Persson's characters in Sweden. But in NO project have they successfully captured the essence of who the character is. It seems absolutely impossible. 

 

It's funny, cause Persson himself recently said that he hasn't been happy with any of the interpretations. I can clearly see what he means. 

[ian]

The only instance that immediately comes to mind is that of Jack Torrance in The Shining. In the book he is a basically decent man who is an alcoholic. This is used against him by the malevolent spirits in the hotel to their advantage, turning him into a monster. In the Stanley Kubrick film, he's pretty much crazy from the first minute; he just gets worse.

 

I've not seen the more recent mini-series, but presumably that is much closer to the book.

[woolf woolf]

This post may come out as non-sensical, but given there's a lot of it in journalism I'll give it a try. I think men are in general portrayed poorly in the screen. When I read a book, I can identify with plenty of male characters, and even when I don't, I can still understand them. In cinema and television, the impossibility of showing a character's thoughts and feelings is a problem affecting both genders; however, this creates a sort of phenomenon that affects men. This phenomenon is that men are natural beings with both emotions and logic behind their actions and attitudes, but as the screen can't show these inner thoughts and feelings it resorts to both stereotypical or very dumbed-down personas. This leads to not knowing which behaviours I should adopt in order to be a man, whilst resonating what happens inside me. The problem with it is that the male models I can resonate with are all literary characters from previous centuries, and it demands that I learn how to adapt these caracters to a 21st century environment. There are still some men I can understand in early cinema, I can guess which thoughts and strifes lead to their behaving like that or saying what they say. I feel there's an underlying idea that men are either perfect beings in everything or damned chauvinists. The conclusion is that men are imperfect in many ways, but the examples we have to follow can only lead us to perfection or to a whole array of boring stereotypes; when we don't follow them, we're still reduced to them by others' perception.

Edited May 21, 2015 by Sousa