Having enjoyed the novel so much, as I said in yesterday's post, I was absolutely dying to see the film and luckily managed to get hold of it, so I'm now in a position to compare the two. And I have to say that unlike Teresa, who was of course the blogger who had liked the film better, I did prefer the book. But that's not to say I didn't love the movie -- it would be hard not to as it is really entirely delightful. Wonderful cast, fabulous locations, terrific period detail -- what's not to like. And I was very happy to discover that on the whole it was amazingly true to the novel, though of course, as I'd assumed in my review yesterday, the inner thoughts of the characters are drastically pruned.
I wasn't entirely happy with the casting of Lady Caroline -- Polly Walker, though undoubtedly pretty, didn't at all measure up to my imagined image of the character who, in the book, is nicknamed Scrap for her extreme slenderness -- Polly, bless her, is far from scrappy, but perhaps the casting people thought she'd have more appeal for 1990s audiences than someone with a typical 1920s boyish figure? Keira Knightly would have been good except she was only seven when the film was made...
Apart from that, the few tweaks that were made to the plot didn't bother me at all, and in fact one of them I thought was a definite improvement. If you've seen it or read it, you'll remember that Briggs is initially very attracted to Rose and then transfers his attention to Caroline. In the novel I found this a bit upsetting and disturbing, and wondered why Caroline was so willing to like him when he'd turned into just another adoring male of the kind she was trying to escape from. But in the movie this was much better handled. Briggs does not fall for Caroline like a ton of bricks because he's got bad eyesight and so is not immediately enthralled by her beauty, which in its turn explains why she is interested in him -- he's not exactly like all the others. However, I did wonder how, if he was so short sighted, he managed not only to appreciate Rose's beauty but to observe her likeness to the painted madonna on the castle wall. But that's a tiny quibble and all in all it was a joy.
