Better than the book?

“The book was better.” In any conversation about a film adaptation, someone is bound to say it. But some books were just meant to be adapted, and some adaptations say new and interesting things about the source material. Just in time for Oscar season — which features several Best Picture nominees based on books, including “Conclave,” “Nickel Boys,” and “A Complete Unknown” — we asked Harvard faculty and staff to share their favorites.

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Allan recommended two classics that are well-loved on both the page and the screen.

“I love Stephen King’s 1987 horror novel ‘Misery,’ which has a pretty straightforward plot: Best-selling romance novelist Paul Sheldon is held captive by his ‘No. 1 fan’ Annie Wilkes, who wants him to write a novel just for her. Oh, and Annie happens to be a murderer! But what I also admire about the novel is that it’s such a great meditation on what it means to be a writer. I’ve read it a few times and taught it here at Harvard, and while it’s a very fun read — but definitely not for the squeamish — there’s a lot more to it. Stephen King wrote it after he had a streak of best-sellers in the 1980s (and the streak is still going), so this drama between Paul and Annie is really an examination of fame, success, and the impact on literature. The 1990 film with James Caan and Kathy Bates, who won an Oscar for Best Actress, is a faithful adaptation, but you lose some of the insight about writing and reading in the translation from page to screen.”

“My other pick is a novel that’s partially about the film industry. As a lover of film noir, I really enjoyed James Ellroy’s 1990 novel ‘L.A. Confidential,’ which is a gritty homage about the moral rot of 1950s Los Angeles hidden behind Hollywood glamor. I’ll be honest, as crime fiction goes, there are a lot of ugly and shocking things in the novel’s elaborate — and at times, overwhelming — plot. And there are certainly no real heroes, since it focuses on the corruption within the police department, but it’s a masterpiece of character development. The 1997 film, which was nominated for Best Picture (I think it should have beaten ‘Titanic’), is one of the best adaptations of a novel I’ve ever seen. It significantly edits the plot to make it more film-friendly, but it absolutely nails the characters and feel of Ellroy’s Los Angeles. For something that’s so much about the illusions of Hollywood, the adaptation makes the story its own while also capturing its essence.”

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Miller has been working his way through the mystery/thriller “Jack Reacher”series, starring an ex-military police officer who wanders the U.S. “with just the clothes on his back and a toothbrush in his pocket.”

“The mysteries themselves are often of merely marginal interest,” Miller said. “I have appreciated instead the slow changes in Child’s technique and thematic interest from book to book. In one volume, Reacher’s obsession with coffee inspires a paragraph-long encomium to a diner’s cup of joe. Another book meditates on the psychology of a driver who would stop for a hitchhiker as imposing as Reacher. A third discourses on the evolutionary biological advantages that make our hero such a fierce warrior. It’s pop fiction, full of stock phrases and situations — every time Reacher gets into a car, he ‘racks the seat back’ to make room for his large frame — but usually executed with skill and verve.

“Little wonder that the series has inspired two films starring Tom Cruise (controversially, given Cruise’s small physical stature) and now a third season of streaming television on Amazon Prime. On the big or small screen, the essentially melodramatic structure of Child’s stories — a Manichean worldview, stock characters and situations — stands out more starkly than in the comparatively digressive novels and short stories. Yet whether on screen or on the page, the series and the character represent well some of the pleasures of popular entertainment: vividly drawn heroes and villains; swift, suspenseful plotting; and a writer continually experimenting with the possibilities within his successful formula.”

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Puchner says there’s nothing particularly special about the 1952 semi-autobiographical novel that Grey wrote when he was in prison and gives an account of a Jewish gang from New York’s Lower East Side during Prohibition. It’s the adaptation that really shines.

“What is striking is how two Italians, the director Sergio Leone and composer Ennio Morricone, transformed this work into a masterpiece, the 1984 film ‘Once Upon a Time in America.’ They understood that film is essentially an operatic genre, that it’s driven by the interplay of scenic images and music on a grand scale, and that dialogue and acting are secondary. Years earlier, they had pioneered this operatic approach to film with the Western, producing their early masterpiece, ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ (1968), in which images and music have equal weight. The dialogue of that movie runs to about 15 pages, a small fraction of a regular screenplay.”

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Levine said he generally finds movie adaptations to lack something in translation. “The Hollywood idea that if it works as a book, it’ll definitely work as a film just seems so deeply misguided. The book-to-film adaptations I’ve really enjoyed are the ones that either bring life to meh novels, or adaptations that are so off-kilter they place the novel in a new light. A good example of the latter is Mary Harron’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ ‘American Psycho,’ which takes Ellis’ relentlessly anhedonic novel and braids its strands of humor into something extraordinarily lively and rich. (Predictably, Ellis hated it).”

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Gravely recommended a short story rather than a book, calling Oates’ 1966 piece “exquisite.”

“Spending only a few pages painting the angsty suburban life of a teenaged Connie, the bulk of the short story is dedicated to a spellbinding showdown between the girl and a stranger whose unnerving menace gradually metastasizes into a grim nightmare,” she said.

Filmmaker Joyce Chopra adapted the work into the 1985 movie “Smooth Talk.”

“Chopra develops the buildup, fleshing out Connie — played by Laura Dern, who even Oates said was ‘dazzlingly right’ — and her emotional experience. Dern depicts Connie’s bursting out of suburban girlhood like a lanky, beautiful fledgling — excited, contradictory, narcissistic, afraid. The film also deepens the roles of each family member and their individual dynamics. Even the perpetually half-renovated home in the middle of nowhere — mentioned maybe in a sentence or two — becomes a central, crucial presence. More dramatically, Chopra changed and complicated Oates’ presumably fatal ending to an offscreen, unnamed horror that Connie survives.

“While maintaining the quirkiness, the terror, and the stark symbolism within Oates’ story, Chopra crafts it into a work of immersive naturalism, letting audiences get to know Connie and unconsciously root for her before the scary turn of events. In the film’s form, the original ending would have taken over the film and become its focus; whereas by letting Connie’s story continue — in a heartbreaking final scene of adolescence lost — all those twisting emotions, reactions, and relationships linger and drift toward any number of futures the viewers are left to envision. There is no exact duplicate when adapting literature to film, but there is taking perfect prose and allowing it to grow within an appropriate cinematic container, as Chopra did so tenderly with Oates’ tale.”