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Movies are visual, plot-driven, and move at their own pace. Novels are (by and large) more cerebral and more character-driven, and they can be read at a pace that the reader is comfortable with. Novels can go off on tangents unrelated to the plot and still keep the reader interested. Novels can give the reader time to put the book down and go the bathroom, get some sleep, or look up references that it contains. Sure, you can watch a movie on DVD and pause it when you like, speed it up or slow it down, but the fact remains that the movie obviously wasn't meant to be experienced that way. Books are different; they are written to hold your interest, but they aren't usually meant to be consumed all in one sitting.

Most movies are written to conform to the three-act structure first defined by Aristotle. The first act is the setup, the second act is the main action, and the third act is the resolution. The "three-act movie" school of thought mandates that the viewer must be kept in suspense at every moment, that he or she is led by the hand from one compelling question to the next. This method of plot construction is neither good nor bad; it's simply how it's done the majority of the time. And that in turn, for better or worse, influences audience's expectations of other movies that they have yet to see. So, when a novel is adapted into a film, some difficult choices must be made about how to convert the plot into a three-act structure.

Some novels are written with a three-act structure already in place (sometimes because the novelist was hoping for a movie adaptation from the beginning). But most of the time, they aren't. So the screenwriter has to impose one. There are essentially two ways to do this: 1) oversimplify the story until it fits into a three-act structure, 2) make some difficult decisions about what makes up the heart of the novel: the most important characters, themes, messages, etc., and re-build the story around those, fitting it into a three-act structure along the way. These two methods may sound identical, but they're not; the latter allows for a richness of texture and character that the former doesn't.

The best examples of the more sophisticated type of filmic adaptation can be found in the works of Stanley Kubrick. Almost all of his movies were based on novels, and yet the films are every bit as sophisticated as the books; in some cases, more so.

The main point I'd have you take away from all this is that, if the book is indeed better than the movie in a specific case, then that should not be taken as an indication that books in general are aesthetically superior to movies in general. What it most likely means is that the book was simply not adapted properly.

Learn more about this author, Michael Cohn.
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