Precocious, winning, and feisty heroine - check off with Cassandra Mortmain. Interesting side characters like the devoted diva-ish stepmother Topaz or the awesome little brother with maddeningly blunt observations - check. Angst. Entanglements. Beautiful rambling countryside and ruined castles. Dramatic plot devices that manage to downplay their dreariness while keeping you fully invested, though that owes mainly to Cassandra's delightful POV. Also........really hot intelligent romantic foils, twists, and surprisingly intellectual whiffs. That last one is new; I wish I had read this when I was younger.
As soon as I finished the book, I remembered that there had been some sort of movie adaptation, and god it would be thrilling to see it onscreen. It was on Youtube, thank the lord, but it was DREADFUL. Stale and angsty and uneven acting, though it had guilty-pleasure potential. "This isn't how I imagined the book to be" is an annoying and lame complaint, I find, but in this case, I thought that they really had not done justice to the book's wit and charm. The book is still primarily a comedy, albeit with some very serious moments, but the movie was trying soooo hard to be a romantic drama. Actually, scratch that. It had no idea what it wanted to be. Coming-of-age quirky comedy or wistful loss of innocence. There was some serious tonal contradiction.
I wasn't a fan of the casting either, though geez, Henry Cavill was fine as fuck. It was the first time I ever sat back and thought, "Oh. God. This guy's looks are truly ridiculous. There is no way anyone mortal looks like this. No wonder he keeps getting comparisons to Greek gods." And I know that Romola Garai is the go-to girl for Spirited & Precocious (she was brilliant in the 2009 "Emma" in what was in my opinion the best embodiment of an Austen novel ever) but I think that all the characters were slightly off-kilter in this one. I guess I'll just have to wait for PBS to inevitably re-make this.
I loved that book when I read it when I was 15. I really should reread it, but I'm worried it won't live up to the memories I have it. It's not that I exactly related to Cassandra (her situation is much more dramatic than the average teenage girl's), but she was an instantly winning protagonist with the way the book starts with her sitting in the kitchen sink or something like that if I remember correctly. I grew to love and relate to her and felt like I would respond to her problems in the same way if faced with them.
ReplyDeleteI made the mistake of trying to watch the movie almost immediately after finishing the book, which is never a good idea because I inevitably mix the two up. But you're right, it wasn't a very good movie. What was a story I could be swept up in, looking like melodramatic crap on screen. The film simply didn't capture the magic of the book despite the laundry list of talented actors in it who were somehow flat. But damn, Henry Cavill made that movie.
The awful thing about it is that I'm re-reading the novel right now and my visualizations of the characters have been instantly replaced by the movie's actors. Ugh.
ReplyDeleteYou should re-read it! I think you can still probably get a kick out of it, and it's instantly relaxing/great nostalgia material.