The Road Movie Vs Book

One of the few advantages that films have over novels is their ability to actually show the audience, in the visual sense, the events of a story. As the saying goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words”, which is applicable to several scenes in the film. I think that one of the most important of these moments is when Homer enters the telegraph office to find Grogan dead and sees the message meant for his family about Marcus’ death. While this was quite a somber scene in the novel, I found it to be even more depressing whilst watching the film adaptation. In addition, actually seeing Homer being tormented by loss and struggling to hold himself together added a human aspect that can’t really be conveyed through words on paper. Personally, I found that the film invoked in me a more …show more content…
The most upsetting of all was how short-changed I felt after seeing how the secondary characters were portrayed. In the novel, many of the most important messages are found in scenes involving minor characters like Miss Hicks or Coach Byfield, and the film vastly undervalued them. In doing so, a large part of the plot is lost, such as the comments the book makes on the American dream. In particular, I found it unfortunate that the whole scene with Miss Hicks was left out, which was really profound and a part of Homer’s growth as a character. Furthermore, leaving these details about secondary characters untold made some points in the film impossible to understand without reading the novel. For example, the viewer is given no back story as to why Byfield tackles Homer, thus the entire metaphor for class inequality and downfalls of the American dream is lost, and it just becomes an awkwardly placed scene in the movie. In all, although these plot sequences were likely overlooked due to time constraints and the Hollywoodization of the film, it definitely suffered as a