When is the movie better than the book?

As a reader, someone who truly enjoys books and the worlds those papers give us, it is rare that I will say a movie is better than the book.

As someone who cannot visualize the worlds being created on those papers, I usually appreciate when a written work is given a visual opportunity, being made into a movie or show. It helps me get a mental picture of what the characters could look like.

I am pretty good about separating the book from the visual medium because I realize they are totally different works. I know you cannot get everything written to the screen or a movie would be 6+ hours every time. I respect (usually) any changes a director or producer or screenwriter make when they bring a book to film.

And sometimes--even considering all those things, I think, "Welp. The book was definitely better"

BUT. There are a few times when I think to myself, "I'm so glad they made this into a film. It was so much better than the book!"

Off the top of my head, I have two of those works. The one I worked through last week was The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. I have to say, as a book-- this was a solid B to B+. It wasn't a horrible book. However, if you've seen the movie you will understand what I am talking about!

I don't remember the first time I watched The Joy Luck Club. It had to have been on TV or something. Or maybe I was in a San Francisco phase. (I did that in high school. I was obsessed with all things Alcatraz and San Fran. Think Murder in the First with Christian Slater and Kevin Bacon.) It might have been then. Whenever it was, I am so grateful I found this movie. I believe I have watched it eight times in my life.

At the time I watched it until about 3 years ago, I don't think I knew it was based on a book. And then I found a podcast called This Movie Changed Me on Apple Podcasts. I found it because Casper ter Kulie of Harry Potter and Sacred Text was a guest on there talking about how You've Got Mail changed him. From there, I binge-listened to every episode of that pilot season.

It was on a binge-listen that Amy Choi came on and talked about The Joy Luck Club movie and how it impacted her as a first generation Asian-American. First off, I need to say that the podcast was incredible and I loved learning about new movies, why they were important to people, and why there are things I could never fully appreciate until I hear someone ELSE enunciate them. Amy Choi did that, for me, with a movie about how immigrant families are separate even from each other in the core unit.

In the movie, we meet 4 Asian immigrant families. The parents all came to America and settled in San Francisco where they raised their (first generation American) children. Choi gives insight on how she felt separate from her own mother for so long because of the gap that forms when families immigrate and the children are raised in the "new culture." This feels like such a universal theme and yet it's not talked about much. It's not depicted all that often in a truly authentic way, which I think Tan did so beautifully with the book and the movie.

Now, the theme for this post is why the movie was better than the book.

Okay. On topic. Go.

Let's compare this to a quilt.

If you sat in one spot and stared at one corner of a quilt, you would get a whole imagery. It would make sense and be beautiful and could be fully appreciated. Then you move your eyes to the next corner; same thing. Repeat until all corners are explored and appreciated. Then take a step back and look at the art as a whole. For the quilt to be truly beautiful, aesthetically pleasing, each individual piece must work with the surrounding pieces. If you focus on just one and make IT the most beautiful, the quilt as a whole will be ugly. There would be no cohesion, no thread tying everything together. It would feel disjointed even if each section was nice.

To me, that was what the movie was like. We have 4 women, 4 mother-daughters and their stories. We have huge overarching themes and stories intertwined with specific and nuanced ones. But the thread that ties everything together, that makes this beautiful, is the dinner the four families are attending together. We always come back to it. We meet in the middle, pick a path, follow it until it leads us back to the middle where we're led down another path. The middle-- the dinner-- makes everything feel connected.

The book though... eh. We don't get that. We get 4 families. 4 stories. Sometimes they overlap. Sometimes a character from another family is brought up. Each story is beautiful and heartbreaking and funny-- same as the movie. But that cohesive element isn't there. I never felt like the families were as enmeshed as they were portrayed in the book.

Maybe Amy Tan didn't want them to be to intertwined. Maybe she didn't want to portray the scene as "all Asian immigrant families become lifelong friends and part of each other's families." That's 1000% fair. Just because these families belong to the same community (Asian immigrants, settled in San Francisco, attend the same church... those defining communities) DOES NOT mean they have to be best friends or adopted families. It's just that there were so many details sprinkled throughout the book which gave us a glimpse of that. I think the movie made those glimpses HIGHLIGHTS and that was what was missing from the book.

Again, this is my personal opinion. I know this book is HIGHLY praised in the literary world. Maybe if I had read it before I watched the movie, I would feel the same. But this movie? Man this movie is something I think so many people NEED to watch. The generational divide feels so strong, there's reels and memes made about it; and this movie took on that topic before it was "a topic."

Links for More Information

Link to Joy Luck Club Episode from TMCM. The Link takes you to the On Being website which hosted This Movie Changed Me podcast for 3 years, final episode aired March 23, 2021.