Adaptation

It’s Memorial Day, and since the weather report called for rain Joe and I did our outdoor stuff yesterday. Grilling, gardening, sweating, the whole bit. It was really chill. Now I’m installed on the couch, doin’ nothin’, which is a little TOO chill. Since I feel like a lazy slug I gave myself an assignment: I looked up movies on Netflix that are adaptations from books, watched one, and reviewed it for you. You’re welcome!

(Incidentally, if you want to search Netflix for this category of movies, you can look for them by using the code number 4961, “dramas based on books.” All the Netflix category codes are compiled on this website here. You’re welcome!)

Not Waving But Drowning

Since there’s a Stevie Smith poem by this name, I figured that’s what landed this movie in the adaptations from books category. But actually, the film is considered a companion piece to a shorter one by the same screenwriter and director, Devyn Waitt, called The Most Girl Part of You, which was adapted from a short story by Amy Hempel. That short film is included as a “prologue” to the main one, and it’s the one that should have been called Not Waving But Drowning, if you ask me. It’s about a teenage girl, Kate, and her best friend, a boy named Big Guy whose mother has just died by suicide. Big Guy copes with his pain by doing weird, self-destructive, kind of sexy things, such as chipping his front tooth on purpose and sewing Kate’s name into his hand, like a kind of tattoo.

The Most Girl Part of You is narrated by the main character, like many movies that are adapted from books. I tend to consider this a lazy choice, but it works well for this little film, in part because it’s only 15 minutes long so it feels more like a story than a movie, and in part because Hempel’s got some good first-person narrative lines that deserve to be preserved: “Big Guy’s hand catches on my dress. I don’t have to look to know that it’s the dry jagged skin from where he pulled my name out of the place where he had sewn it.”

In the feature-length film, the best friendship is between two teenage girls, Sara and Adele. They’re about to have their “revolutionary summer,” when they’ll leave their small town and move to New York City together. Between Adele’s Violent Femmes t-shirt and her parents’ “modern” kitchen with tall white cabinets and big fake plants, it seems to be set in the late 80s, but if that’s the case then there are a few anachronistic turns of phrase here and there, so it’s hard to say.

Sara has some trouble at home and decides to stay with her parents for a while, which leaves Adele, who’s a little wilder anyway, to try New York on her own. Sara starts her new job as an art teacher at an old folks’ home, which has a little more intrigue than you’d expect, thanks to the glamorous Sylvia, one of the only “half classy babes” in that joint. Sylvia wears silk robes and smokes cigarettes and used to be a painter, and is played by Lynn Cohen, who’s very good. (You might remember her as Miranda’s Ukrainian nanny from “Sex and the City.”) Meanwhile, Adele is in filthy New York, where dudes stalk her on subway platforms and her weird roommate won’t give her a key, so she has to sleep on the front step one night when he doesn’t come home. She makes a fun new friend too, but her friend, a beautiful young woman who lives in the building next door, hangs out with sketchy guys; not so good. Then she meets Adam Driver, and they have a lovely, if painfully awkward and totally realistic friend / love relationship that buoys the movie after it has started to drift.

The real love story though, of course, is between Adele and Sara, and by the movie’s end we’re left to wonder whether their friendship can survive the big changes in their lives. Throughout the movie, the plot-moving parts are intercut with beautiful sequences that have indie and electropop music swelling behind them—a bit like music videos—which makes the whole thing feel a little overcooked. But I’m a sucker for that sort of thing, especially when what’s being mined is the emotional lives of young women. The thing is, kids their age who have just grown up and are setting out on their own tend to romanticize their own lives as it is; a film that exaggerates this feeling doesn’t necessarily distort it, in my opinion, but highlights and enhances a lovely sort of melodrama that is already there.

The real strength of a small indie movie like this one, when all’s said and done, is that it has the same eye for detail that a good novel or short story does—like the way the girls’ eyes gleam, liquid, when they lie flat on the bed in the darkness and talk. In that sense, then, the film feels like a literary adaptation in the best way.

Here’s that Stevie Smith poem, for reference: