Marley & Me
Book vs. Movie Adaptation
Transforming a book into a movie is a risky endeavor. Most often, the book wins the popularity contest and the audience is disappointed with the film version. Seeing as how it is usually impossible to fit the entire storyline of a book into a movie without the movie being four or more hours, parts of the story need to be taken out which can affect the production negatively in the end. The audience knows when aspects of the book are being left out, and it is not a part of the movie-making process that is generally smiled upon by movie-goers.
I chose to talk about the book Marley & Me by John Grogan. I was excited to read this book because I am an animal lover and I knew by the brief synopsis on the back of the book that I would stay interested, which is a problem I sometime run into with books. I read it right around the Christmas season, so it hit home with the warm feelings and the loving family atmosphere. It is rare that a book actually makes me laugh out loud, and at times in Marley & Me, I was literally cracking up by myself. Part of the reason I found some of the things the character Marley did so funny was because my family and I have a golden retriever named Sugarbear who has done or could potentially do some if the ridiculous things Marley did. I finished the book in a couple weeks and as I grew to love the characters, especially Marley, I was greatly effected by the emotional ending of the story. I cried, I was even in a slump for the rest of the day because I could not stop thinking about the ending.
I was excited to hear the book was being made into a cinematic production, I was a bit skeptical about how the storyline was going to be edited. When I was reading the book I had pictured all the characters in my head as I saw them, I had pictured their homes, their surroundings, everything to the leash they used for Marley, in my mind. I did not expect John Grogan’s wife to look like Jennifer Aniston and I did not expect John Grogan to look like Owen Wilson, but, that’s Hollywood, everyone has to be pretty. The movie started off immediately by leaving out something I had remembered reading from the book, John says in the book he had a dog as a little boy by the name of Shaun, and they were best friends, etc. There was no mention of this in the movie, in fact, John Grogan in the movie said he had never had a dog before. This was a minor exemption, but noted.
Marley was an extremely neurotic dog, he had countless anxieties. He was terrified of thunderstorms and he would have such traumatic experiences when they occurred. He would rub his nose raw until it bled, he would rip things to shreds, he would temporarily go out of his mind. The film kind of skimmed over this and even though it wasn’t a funny part of Marley’s life, it was a crucial aspect of his strange disposition. Another portion that I think the movie did not go into enough detail about was the Grogan’s experience with the obedience trainer. The film did include a scene or two but I found the book’s description of the trainer and her interactions with Marley to be far more detailed.
Overall, I did enjoy the film adaptation of Marley & Me. The book was more descriptive and I was more fond of the images I produced in my head of the story, but its always interesting to see what the story would look like in movie form. I was not disappointed in the film, I think that considering the large amount of content in the book, the film did a satisfactory job condensing it into a reasonable length. I loved Marley’s character in the movie just as much as I loved him in the book.
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