Norweigan Wood: What Were the Directors Even Doing?

        The Norwegian Wood movie was extremely disappointing. I really only understood what was going on during the movie because I had read the novel, and I’m sure that many of the film’s viewers had already read the novel. But the lack of both strong scenes and character building most likely left viewers who have not read the novel extremely confused. I mean, the point of adapting a book to film is to successfully translate the source material into something digestible. And while the film generally doesn’t have to follow the book completely, it felt as though Norwegian Wood tried to and failed horrifically. Or at least when it didn’t follow the book (i.e., the opening scene of the novel, or the emphasis on food, or even Midori's father’s final words), it ended up making the characters much less complex and harder to follow.

        In fact, the removal of most scenes or the shortening of others really led me not to care about any of the characters, including the relationships between them. When Naoko died, I simply didn’t care. Whereas in the novel, I felt as though I had lost someone important to myself. The translation from the novel to the film is just extremely poor. I struggle to understand how the movie could possibly be as long as it was, without having some of the most important scenes or even developing character relationships. Storm trooper’s and Nagasawa’s characters were cut down to a few scenes, none of which were significant.

        The movie focused so much on sex that it felt like pornography. The scenes where Toru has sex seem to be the only ones that were genuinely “fleshed out”. This again leads me to not care about the characters. I didn’t have the same feeling watching Reiko and Toru have sex as I did reading it. It felt wrong, but there was no substantial reasoning for it (except for the fact that I had already read the novel). I think that if I had not read the novel, I would be extremely confused when certain characters were introduced and would not remember them when they were reintroduced. 

        I am not alone in this opinion. Many online reviewers and my classmates have voiced this same discontent with the film. Overall, I think it was very poorly executed. I may be missing some sort of symbolism or expert design choice in the making of this film, but I honestly don’t care if I am. It was a hard watch. 

- Kyla Pascoe