Movie

I have posted the trailer for the movie once more because I decided to actually watch the movie. The movie stars Kathy Bates, Mary Stuart Masterson, Mary-Louise Parker, and Jessica Tandy. The movie overall did a good job of expressing the main themes and plot of the story. It got out the message that Fannie Flagg had intended when she wrote the story. It was well casted and they did a great job.

         There were many, many differences though that I found to be interesting. First of all, the way the book is written makes it hard to convert into a movie. It has a bunch of little episodes of story from all different time periods that you have to connect to each other to understand the story. Obviously that would have been a very confusing movie. They ended up putting most of it in chronological order.

         One of the major differences was that they left out alot of the black slaves stories and even some of the characters. I think that they did this because they wanted to make the story revolve mostly around Ruth and Idgie and going into detail about other smaller characters would have taken away from the main plot line. By doing so, they had to change the way that Buddy died and introduced Ruth much earlier into the movie. Ruth comes into Idgie’s life when she is a teenager and in the movie Ruth knows Idgie when she was just a little kid. For the movie they needed to be able to build up the relationship between Ruth and Idgie quickly and if they had waited to bring her into the plot it would have taken too long to fully grasp their relationship.

         Also there are many times in the book when Mrs.Threadgoode is telling the story and does not know the full details of what had happened which made the book much more mysterious. For example, when Idgie went on trial for killing Frank Bennett, the reader did not find out who actually killed him until way after the trial. The reader got a chance to guess who killed Mr.Bennet. In the movie, everything is chronological so you get to see that Sipsey killed Frank leaving no mystery. Since it was a movie, the only way to show that Frank had been murdered was to show the scene before the trial or else it could have been confusing.

         In the book during the trial, Ruth had already died so she was unable to testify for Idgie. In the movie Ruth was alive. I found this to be peculiar because it doesn’t make sense that Ruth was able to testify for Idgie and Idgie still be in trouble. Ruth was her alibi in the movie which helped her get out of the trouble but in the book that is the reason the trail gets even worse for Idgie.

         Now to discuss Evelyn. In the movie Evelyn attends all of these classes to help her marriage which she doesn’t do in the book. I think she does this to emphasize how bad her marriage really is. Also it is hard to understand how depressed Evelyn really is in the movie. In the book she explains how she is practically suicidal. The movie does not do the best job of explaining this.

One of the biggest differences between the book and the movie is that Mrs. Threadgoode never dies and they imply that Mrs. Threadgoode is Idgie. They never go into Mrs.Threadgoode’s life or ever show her in any of the flashback. In the book they are clearly two separate people. I can’t quite figure out why they would do this. In the book there are so many different characters each with their own stories and backgrounds. The screenwriter might have thought it would be easier to cut her out and just make Mrs. Threadgoode be Idgie.  Evelyn looks up to both characters, Idgie and Mrs. Threadgood.  By making them the same person it ties the story together a little better and more simply.