A Simple Plan: The movie, and the book

Having recently finished reading Scott Smith's first novel, A Simple Plan, I watched the movie of the book last night. And it was...okay.

I don't want to give anything away plot-wise about either the movie or the book, so I'll just make some general observations. The movie followed the book up to a point, but there were two huge deviations from the book's plot in the movie. I can understand why the changes were made. The story told in the movie is tighter, and the most dramatic events occur in the denouement. In the movie, the actions of the protagonist, Hank Mitchell, wind up being much less morally ambiguous than they are in the book: fewer bad things happen, for one thing, and because of various changes in the way the story is told, Hank is less cold-blooded in doing them.

It's hard to tell how I would have reacted to the movie not having the book to compare it to, but from where I sit the book was far the superior of the two. The book held me spell-bound. It was scary. I didn't want to stop reading. I felt none of that suspense while watching the film. (One thing I found surprisingly frightening about Smith's writing was his descriptions of the crows in the nature preserve where some of the story takes place. Shiver-inducing, somehow.) The protagonist falls much farther in the book than he does in the movie, as I suggested above. Reading it, one is impressed by how Smith makes that descent seem inevitable, nearly robbing Hank of freedom of action and thus culpability while having him do some really terrible things. This is whitewashed in the movie, and I think it's the weaker for it. Thoughts?

Tags: A Simple Plan, Scott Smith