Book v. Movie

When reading, it is inevitable to picture the scene that is being described.  When I read Waiting for Godot, I imagined a tall tree and men that spoke with American accents, when you read the book, you may have pictured something else entirely.  A film based on a book literally depicts every part of the book that a director thought necessary to include.  There is much less room for interpretation and any parts that you carefully built an image of are instantly replaced with someone else’s analysis and cinematographic expertise. 

In Michael Lindsay Hogg’s Waiting for Godot, everyone is dressed very poorly and have old ragged clothes.  Also, there is never any real sunshine, or any object that can be said to symbolize even the slightest glimmer of hope or happiness.  Not that I was expecting Estragon’s boots to be made of Italian leather, but, I also thought that the reader/viewer had to infer the symbolisms so that the characters and the setting were neutral and the message of the book/movie was derived from sheer inference and interpretation. 

Having said this, the characters were bland.  The book transmits energy through inactivity, nothing happens.  In the movie, the actors try very hard to interpret the text and add emotion and drama to the alleged nothingness that made the play famous.  For example, in the movie, when Pozzo wants to leave and demands that Lucky help him, he gets angry and flustered.  The feeling that I got from the book was, to be redundant, that noting happened.  Lucky didn’t really care if they left or about the way that Pozzo treated him.  That is why he is lucky.  He doesn’t worry or hurry, because he is dumb.  He is an example of the saying that ignorance is bliss. 

In my criticism of the movie’s misinterpretation of Beckett’s intentions I have to say that the movie is more interesting than the book.  The book is better— I hope I am not confusing you too much— because it is absurdly meaningless, but that is the point and that is what gives it a glimpse of meaning.  The movie, on the other hand, is a scanty hybrid between something happening, and nothing happening.  In this way it accomplishes two things: 1) to bore the viewer into a comatose state, and 2) to insult Beckett’s original (faulty) idea of Waiting for Godot.