BOOK TO FILM: THE GRASS HARP

Last night I watched The Grass Harp. I figured, well, I loved the book (I hadn’t liked other Capote books I’d read, but coworker D pressed The Grass Harp upon me and as promised, it was good—simple and sweet and gorgeously written, so that’ll teach me a lesson for badmouthing Capote’s fiction), plus the cast was stacked: Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Sissy Spacek, Nell Carter, Joe Don Baker, Edward Furlong, Charles Durning, Mary Steenbergen, Sean Patrick Flanery (who I used to adore when I was 14 and he was in the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles).

Unfortunately, the movie...sort of sucked. I mean, it was competently made, but it was a poor adaptation, in that they took a tender, subtle, well-written book and made it mawkish and cheesy. They gave the book the worst kind of makeover, changing major details in a way that only served to make the story more cliche—which character gets shot, what illness a major character dies of, and the entire end of the story, in which the narrator grows up and leaves town. In the book he goes to law school to become a judge—the character who’s been a sort of father figure to him in the story is a retired judge—and before he leaves, he and the judge go walking in a meadow. The book ends thus: “A waterfall of color flowed across the dry and strumming leaves; and I wanted then for the Judge to hear what Dolly had told me: that it was a grass harp, gathering, telling, a harp of voices remembering a story. We listened.” In the movie, the character leaves town because he wants to become a writer, and the voiceover goes on ad nauseum about how he wants to tell all the stories that the grass harp has told him, because it’s Dolly’s voice he hears speaking to him, and they’re her stories, blah blah, beating you over the head with the grass harp metaphor, sentimental nonsense that would make Truman Capote gag. (I hate it when movies about children end with the narrator growing up and becoming a writer and telling you this very story.) I was watching the movie alone, but during the last 10 minutes I kept feeling compelled to do the finger-gun-to-the-head gesture in sheer frustration, interspersed with booing. I’m so glad I read the book first, because if I’d seen the movie first I’d never have been interested in reading the book.