Juliet (naked) - the film

I was mildly surprised a few days ago when I saw that our local television film channel would be showing the film adaptation of Nick Hornby's "Juliet (naked)" book, to which I have referred several times on this blog. I didn't even know that the book had been filmed. My first thought was that Hornby has a very high ratio of films to books - "Fever pitch" (twice), "High fidelity", "About a boy", "A long way down" and now "Juliet (naked)". The unfilmed (as yet) books are "How to be good", "Slam" and "Funny girl"; the last book would make a good film.

As I have probably written ad nauseam, I dislike films (or television series) based on books that change things for no apparent reason. This film was no different: whilst there were changes which made sense, others were annoying. The lamest change of all was giving protagonist Tucker Crowe the email address 'tucker.crowe@aol.com'! Really! Surely the obsessive fans would have tried this in their attempt to contact their hero. In the book, Crowe chooses for his email address the name of a minor character from one of Charles Dickens' books (I don't remember it off-hand) from which no one would have made the connection to Crowe. On the basis of this moniker, Annie brings Crowe some Dickens' novels when she visits him in hospital.

The main characters didn't match up physically to how I envisaged them: Duncan should have been shorter, pudgier and less self-confident whereas Annie should have been taller (I have to admit that I was very taken with the actress who played Annie - Rose Byrne - who is Australian, which explains her varying accent). The look I envisaged for Tucker Crowe was as a younger version of Richard Dreyfuss in "My life in ruins"; I'm fairly sure that the book describes him as having short cropped hair. On the other hand, the town councillor was pretty much as I expected him.

So: I was underwhelmed. The parts of the book which spoke to me did not come over in the film and so we were left with a fairly lame and unlikely tale. It will be interesting to see what my wife thinks of the film.