Book vs. Movie: Charlie St. Cloud
By Russ Bickerstaff
August 4, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.
Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Movie.
Charlie St. Cloud
A few months after September 11, 2001, NBC news producer Ben Sherwood quit his job to write a book. It was a wistful little tale of the love, loss, hope and the great beyond set in a small town on the East Coast. He even went to a small town on the East Coast to find a realistic setting for the book. The Death And Life Of Charlie St. Cloud met with a certain amount of acclaim and promptly became a bestseller. A breezy read at less than 300 pages, the novel has a sweet simplicity to it that would naturally lend itself to the screen. Get the right people together and you just might have a decent slightly supernatural drama for late summer. Filmed in Canada to keep down production costs, the film is opening on enough screens that it is likely to make enough money to bring in a healthy profit. The question is: which is a better treatment of the story: a brief novel set on the east coast, or the cinematic drama filmed in Vancouver?
The Book
The Death And Life of Charlie St. Cloud opens with an intro related by a minor character in the story who turns out to be dead. The fact that this isn’t terribly interesting is one of many failures of a remarkably unsophisticated book. Ben Sherwood seems to want to tell a simple story about love, loss and coming of age. And while the story itself explores these themes in a clear and concise way, the prose does so in a way that only barely manages to muster up anything terribly clever or insightful.
The story takes place in a tiny fishing village in New England. It’s based on an actual town, but Sherwood’s idealized writing makes it feel intensely sanitized. Sherwood saddles the story with a style that feels somewhere between Frank Capra, Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney. It’s disturbingly wholesome from beginning to end - even when the title character has sex with the ghost of a woman who has not died. (But I’m getting ahead of myself.)
From the quaint confines of the tiny New England fishing village, we are introduced to Charlie, a regular guy with a heart of gold who makes a promise to his little brother - something involving playing catch on a regular basis - a promise that gets considerably more complicated when a trip to a Red Sox game results in an auto accident that nearly kills both of them. Sam dies. Charlie doesn’t. And so, Charlie ends up going to a wooded area near a cemetery to play catch with the ghost of his little brother every single night.
Enter Tess - a wholesome girl who is, of course, very attractive and fiercely independent. She’s a sailor who is intensely competitive and consequently very intimidating. She’s never met a man who has been a match for her. An inadvertent trip to the cemetery finds Tess visiting the cemetery - a cemetery Charlie now works at. (In regular contact with the ghost of his brother, Charlie can see ghosts before they cross over to the great beyond.) Tess is charmed by Charlie’s evidently good looks and his aggressively wholesome personality.
Tess and Charlie hit it off and make a date for him to make her dinner. The night of the date, Charlie has a quick, perfunctory meeting with his little brother before heading off for a romantic evening with Tess. It’s a suitably sweet evening between the two of them. Some time later, she runs into his little brother. The fact that she can see him suggests that something’s wrong - no one can see Sam but Charlie. As it turns out, Tess is, in fact a spirit. Now Charlie and Sam have to acquaint Tess with the idea of being a ghost and exactly what that might entail. Just as she’s begun to come to terms with her situation, Charlie spends one final night with her wherein he has the aforementioned spectral coitus with her, awakening to find that she seems to have left a hint that she might not actually be dead. Thus, he quickly convinces a friend of his to boat him out to an outcropping of rock where they find her nearly dead. Yes, they DO take her back to a hospital. Yes, she IS alive - in a coma. In the process of saving her life, Charlie missed his first night with Sam since his death. Sam moves on and things get weird. Now he’s an angel overlooking Sam, helping him to find Tess. Years later, she’s out of the coma and she remembers everything. It’s kind of an anti-climactic ending…
The Movie
The film opens with Charlie and Sam sailing. Played by reasonably charming, young screen actor Zac Efron, Charlie is seen winning a sailing race in high school with his little brother Sam (Charlie Tahan.) Okay, so I might’ve zoned-out during some of Sherwood’s gratuitous folksiness, but I’m pretty certain that Charlie wasn’t a terribly big boater in the book. The film gives Charlie a major sailing obsession and something to really sink into beyond working at the cemetery and hanging out with ghosts.
The boating obsession also gives Charlie some common ground with Tess (played here by Amanda Crew.) This compromises things a bit. First off, in the novel, with sailing, he’s entering her world. The fact that they both have a love of sailing in common does make the romance that much more believable, but it makes Charlie’s journey towards opening up with Tess seem that much less dangerous to him.
The film allows Efron to portray a much more charismatic Charlie than the one in the book. A guy absolutely obsessed with his dead brother and little else - a man who works at a cemetery and talks to dead people makes for a far darker figure than the one Efron’s given to play here, but with less darkness comes greater complexity. The exact particulars of the accident that caused Sam to die, while not that dissimilar to those in the book, shift around the darkness. The accident happens after a brief fight between the two. The film paints a considerably more nuanced, considerably less idealized relationship between the brothers than the one rendered by Sherwood. There are more overt shades of animosity between the brothers that surface even after Sam’s death. It makes for a much more tolerably realistic dynamic between the brothers.
Having less time to explore the relationship between Tess and Charlie, the romantic end of the story ends up being much more dramatically intensified. The film skips a large portion of the initial dinner date between the two. This isn’t missed as much as one might expect. An earlier meeting between the two establishes the sailing connection and does much of the work of the earlier end of the romance. The revelation that Tess is, in fact, a spirit is handled much more bluntly here. The book’s chance encounter between Tess and Sam is considerably moodier and more disturbing than the sudden, dramatic scene in the film. Charlie hears that Tess’s boat crashed and she’s disappeared just as we see Tess looking in a window only to see that she casts no reflection. Though we do get a taste of many of the same interactions between Charlie and Tess in the film that we do in the book, the complexity of everything washes away and even Tess’s apparent death comes across with considerably less impact in the film.
And then there is the inevitable search for Tess. The choice to try to save her over meeting with Sam and Sam’s subsequent passing into the spirit world for good are much less overwhelmingly obvious and melodramatic in the film. Charlie’s on the boat when he finally realizes that he must continue the search or return to land in time for sunset to meet with Sam. By then, it’s more of a foregone conclusion…and Sam’s passing is handled in a cheesy, Spielbergian flash of images from earlier in the film. Rather than taking the form of a cloud as he does in the book, we see a shooting star pointing to Tess’ exact location. Charlie utters Sam’s name and leaps into action. Very Hollywood.
The film rectifies Tess’ anticlimactic coma, moving straight to a scene between she and Charlie in which she comes to realize that those dreams of her with him actually happened. In a final scene, we see Sam meet-up with Charlie one last time. Rather than showing-up as the adult he would never get to be, he shows up again in the same form. He says something along the lines of “we’ll never get to see what will never be.” The two exchange the vow that they will always be brothers and Charlie goes off to meet Tess. The camera pulls away. The credits roll.
The Verdict/b>
Sherwood’s book makes for an interesting story that isn’t delivered all that well, due in great part to the narrative’s relentlessly wholesome folksiness. The film had the potential to go for a darker, more nuanced take on the story - a potential that it only halfway meets. While the film’s treatment of Sam and Charlie’s relationship seems that much more complex than it does in the book, the romance between Charlie and Tess lacks enough time between the two lovers to develop the kind of complexity necessary for a completely well-rounded presentation of the story. As a result, the romantic end of the film feels a bit flat in comparison to the book.
The film’s inability to deliver completely on the romance between Tess and Charlie dooms its chances for commercial success in the long run. Ideally, Charlie St. Cloud should appeal equally to both men and women. The brother-to-brother thing would appeal to men the way the romantic angle would appeal to women. Without enough time spent on the romance to show its complexity, the film misses half its audience - and with so many movies currently in release that appeal to men and so few that appeal to women, the film isn’t going to be that successful. Efron is already bringing quite a few women to theaters, but when they get there, they don’t get nearly enough romance to make it worth the effort in the first place. Research shows that nearly 80% of the opening weekend audience was female. A film with a $44 million production budget has only grossed $12 million its opening weekend. The film is unlikely to be the kind of success the novel has been for Sherwood.