Book vs. Movie
I Don’t Know How She Does It
By Russ Bickerstaff
September 22, 2011
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.
I Don’t Know How She Does It
Charming British teacher and advertising salesperson Allison Pearson had the good fortune to become a professional TV critic for The Independent, a morning tabloid paper out of London. Her success there managed to land her what quite a lot of us critics long for: a book. In 2002, a mere ten years after she started writing for The Independent, she published her first novel. I Don’t Know How She Does It was a huge success and centered around a woman who is the mother of two and hedge fund manager. Pearson’s analysis of the modern business world and motherhood were a big hit, quickly becoming a best-seller in both England and America.
Although it is often glossed over as a side item in films and TV shows and such out of Hollywood, the subject of high-powered, white-collar motherhood was something of a novelty. Hollywood film producers, including the Weinstein Brothers, became interested in turning the British novel into an American film. Screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna (The Devil Wears Prada screenplay, Morning Glory) was brought-in to Americanize the book in Hollywood style. A post-Sex In The City Sarah Jessica Parker was cast in the role. British novel, Hollywood movie - how do the two compare?
The Book
This is a novel by a charming British woman, written in the first person with all kinds of cleverly witty turns of phrase. As an American, my first impression instinct is to compare Allison Pearson to Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones’ Diary.) And as I read the book, I tried to distance myself from that notion, but… Pearson’s prose style really is a lot like Fielding’s. So there. I’ve said it. I’d say it again if I had to. With that firmly behind me, I can move on…
The first-person perspective that the book is told from is that of one Kate Reddy, a woman who grew-up in a lower-class area in northern England. She has worked hard and promptly grown to become a very successful hedge fund manager with a big company known as EMF. (Not to be confused with the European Monetary Fund, or for that matter, the British indie dance band.) Reddy is very successful. She lives in a nice place and has a couple of kids and a husband who works the kind of job (an architect) that allows him plenty of time to act as day care (and evening care) for the kids when Reddy is away acting as the primary source of income for the family.
Aside from having kind of a witty prose style, Pearson does cast a rather deft light into the world of women in the financial services industry. Women’s liberation has gone a long way, but it still has a huge amount of progress to make in the way of motherhood. As this is rarely spoken about or covered in the press in any kind of substantial way, Pearson’s work is among the first to explore the subject matter. It’s really important that this sort of thing gets addressed if we’re truly to become equal. I Don’t Know How She Does It is a very socially relevant book even now, nearly a decade after it was published. It is this social relevance that has catapulted it to the kind of success that it rightly deserves. That being said, the novel itself is a bit of a harried mess.
The wit and wisdom of the novel could easily be distilled into a book a fraction of the length of I Don’t Know How She Does It. The plot meanders quite a bit - just like real life, I suppose, but there are moments in here that feel larger than life and throw the whole thing out of perspective. Reddy is given an American client - one Jack Abelhammer. He is a charming American businessman who gets compared to George Clooney just enough that one can’t help but imagine him in the role. (And with the prose style being sufficiently Fielding-esque, it’s inevitable that one pictures Renée Zellweger as Reddy.)
Through a brief misdirection of emails, Reddy and Abelhammer become a bit closer than business associates. Reddy has feelings for him that she doesn’t have for her husband. There’s a kind of a chaste affair between the two of them that involves email more than anything. While we don’t get to know Abelhammer OR Reddy’s husband enough to feel that much for either of them, we do get a really striking picture of Reddy, psychological blemishes and all. If there is any impressive quality to this book beyond its social relevance, it lies in a truly compelling picture of a single character in a very complex world.
Apart from the ongoing stresses of motherhood, the conflict in the novel comes in the form of this relationship with Abelhammer and eventually, a couple of plot points with supporting characters that were evidently thrown in at the end in an evident attempt to crystallize the struggle for women between motherhood and the business world. What starts off charmingly enough ends up feeling kind of rushed. Reddy is trying to fake a home-baked pastry for a bake sale at the beginning of the book. Pearson is tying to fake a much more elaborately constructed, artificial plot at the end of the novel. The kind of novel Pearson is going for by the end of the book is one that simply has no business being in a story that sets out to be as naturalistic as it does.
The Movie
The alarming thing about the film version of I Don’t Know How She Does It is how perfectly it conforms to what one would expect. This is a Hollywood film based on a contemporary British novel. The translation is perfect, right down to the Hollywood ending. Sarah Jessica Parker plays the Renée Zellweger role - a pretty close American analog to Zellweger. Parker is only a few years older than her. And whereas Zellweger was very iconic as a woman in first person narration in a British accent as Bridget Jones, Parker was just as iconic in first person narration with an American accent as Carrie Bradshaw in Sex In The City.
American audiences are likely to compare Parker’s Reddy to an older version of Bradshaw, which is not entirely unfair. Parker does a solidly respectable job of distancing this role from that one simply by playing the part without exaggeration. Had she paid more attention to trying to make Reddy less like Bradshaw, it would have come across much more forced than it does here.
The film’s Reddy works for an EMF not altogether unlike the EMF in the book. Here she is working on developing a project with one Jack Abelhammer, a British businessman living in New York played by Pierce Brosnan. (And just to carry out the comparison, Brosnan is approaching 50. Clooney, who the book’s character is compared to, will turn 50 this May. Is Brosnan the British Clooney? Not exactly, but the two are pretty good analogs of each other.)
Being a Hollywood gloss of a textured and complex British novel, the darker end of the story is eliminated. Yes, Reddy and Abelhammer develop feelings for each other, but here they are considerably more chaste. There’s no kiss here . . . no drunken night between the two of them that doesn’t involve sex. They’re simply spending a lot of time together. And Reddy’s relationship with her husband (played here by Greg Kinnear) is considerably less intimate than it is in the book. The book’s Reddy is reluctant to have sex with her husband. Here she wants to have sex with him, but she simply doesn’t have the time or energy to do so.
Eliminating the harshness of the darker end of things makes it all considerably more cheerful, but it keeps the drama from feeling entirely earned. The feelings that are supposed to develop between Reddy and Abelhammer don’t feel as authentic because they aren’t given much screen time. Reddy’s husband leaves her near the end of the book, only to tenuously return. Here that’s reduced to a harsh argument.
The problem here is that while the plot does a much better job of feeling structured and artificial, it lacks an authentic enough motivation to make the plot seem significant in any real sense. It’s a Hollywood plot that’s trying to cling to a story crafted by a British author with no real sense of plot structure. It falters. The last-minute things that are thrown in at the end are developed a bit more (and both given to Olivia Munn to handle, which she does a pretty good job of). Even with a bit more warning, those little bits that are added-in don’t feel any less artificial, but artifice is much more at home in a Hollywood movie than it is in any other form of narrative fiction, so it’s more acceptable. That doesn’t make it any more endearing, though. Parker’s Reddy is off to make snowmen with her children at the end of her story, successfully balancing work and family life with a husband freshly committed to keeping it all together. Real nice and everything, but it’s an ending formed on a film every bit as imbalanced as the book its based on.
The Verdict
The plight of young mothers in the business world is one that is truly worthy of a decent, well-crafted piece of narrative fiction. And while both the film and the book go a long way towards giving the struggle a voice, both Hollywood and novel writers everywhere have a great deal of work to do to craft a story that better frames the issues in a way that is both compelling and believably representational of the realities facing society as a whole.
Both book and movie are formed on interesting ideas and compelling characters, but both feel imbalanced in a very fundamental way that at least partially undermines the importance of the subject matter they’re trying to cover.