*Warning* I highly suggest watching the movie before reading my review....
I really enjoy reading books that have been made into movies. I enjoy seeing if the movie matches what I imagined in my head while reading the book.
Needless to say I am one of those people who overuses the statement, "You HAVE to read the book. The book was sooooooooo much better than the movie." Most of the time what I watch on screen is no where near what I read on paper. (With the obvious exception of all of the Harry Potter movies where EVERYTHING was exactly how I pictured it.)
Anyway, this was one of the few examples that I actually enjoyed the movie more than the book. (Forrest Gump is the only other one I can think of right now...)
Don't get me wrong, the book wasn't bad at all. I just liked the movie so much more. I'll try to explain why...
First, the one thing that really ticked me off with both the book and the movie was that they ruined two other books that were on my never ending to read list. So fair warning, if you've never read Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, plan on reading them first if you don't want the endings ruined. Oh, also, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye too...(I already read those, so they weren't ruined.)
The main character in the book, Pat, is reading these books to better understand his wife, Nikki, a High School English teacher. In the movie, after reading A Farewell to Arms, he throws the book through a window because he was upset with the ending. After reading so many spoilers about other novels, I wanted to throw The Silver Linings Playbook through the window...but it was too small of a book and only ended up scaring the cats instead of breaking glass.
There are some ironies between the movie and the book. In the book, Pat becomes disenchanted with some of the books he's reading because they lack happy endings. He feels that movies are more optimistic and that teenagers should be reading more positive pieces of literature. I find this funny because in my opinion the movie had a much better ending than the book. I also find it funny that in the movie Pat and his family live in Philly but in the book they live in South Jersey...
So besides the fact that I liked the movie more than the book, I have to admit both really struck a nerve. The book/movie starts off with Pat in a mental health institution. He gets out, he takes pills. At first he's a little crazy but then he evens out. I get this, I really do. It hit home and scared me. I've been in institutions, I take pills. I get crazy and for the most part, I'm evened out. The reason it scared me is that it made me realize all the crap that everyone in Pat's life does to tiptoe around him in case he had an "episode". How many people did or do that with me?
On a side note, speaking of mental illness, I find it interesting to know that many mood stabilizers often double as antiepileptics to prevent or treat seizures. If you tell someone you have epilepsy you don't get the same reaction as you do when you tell them you're Bipolar. It pisses me off that being Bipolar has a negative connotation to it....anyway, back to the book.
I like Pat, I can identify with him. I liked Tiffany more in the movie than in the book and can completely understand why Jennifer Lawrence got an award. Veronica is still a bitch in both the movie and the book. In the movie there is a definitive shift from the beginning when Pat is starting to take his meds to the end where he seems to have stabilized and is reaching for his silver lining. It seems in the book that Pat never really reaches his silver lining but the book doesn't rule it out entirely.
Lastly, Pat's father in the book and Pat's father in the movie are really two entirely different characters. Both have characteristics that help explain some of Pat's behavior but I tend to like Robert DeNiro in the movie more than the jerk in the book. It's hard to explain but I felt more sympathy for his father in the movie than I did for the character in the book.
So to sum it up, I couldn't put the book down and seriously didn't get up until I finished it. It's really one of those books that is so well written that you can zoom right through it taking it all in and forgetting about the real world. Like I said earlier, it's not that it's a bad book it's just that the movie is so good that it overshadows the book.
Read it, watch it...love it. I did.
Check out the author's website for more! http://matthewquickwriter.com/
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