preview

Compare and Contrast High Fidelity Novel and Film

Satisfactory Essays
Open Document

Compare and Contrast High Fidelity Novel and Film High Fidelity, the novel written by Nick Hornby, and the film adaptation, directed by Stephen Frears, both portrayed the vital information for the plot however, Hornby was able to convey the ideas better through literary techniques. The novel was adapted into a feature film in 2000 starring John Cusack as Rob and directed by Stephen Frears. The movie was accurate in portraying the novel to a certain extent. The film was able to successfully represent the main ideas of the original novel but when it came to the minute details, it was lacking the contributions of the story that gave it a certain tone that the Hornby, was trying to convey to his audience. The most noticeable differences …show more content…

In the film, however, the actress cast to play Laura, Iben Hjejle, is a blonde with shoulder length hair that does not have big eyes, rather, she has a very strong jaw bone and small eyes. Although the novel was only written a short five years previous to the making of the film, changing the look of Laura in the film may have been done to better suit the style of the early 2000s rather than that of the mid 1990s and to also make a better distinction of the different settings in the novel and film. The looks of London in 1995 were much different than those of Chicago in 2000. The novel wanted to better capture Laura’s style of the 1995 skinhead movement of the European fads, as described in the novel, whereas the film was trying to portray Laura as being more of a punk in modern society trying to break into the working class. Laura was not the only woman in Rob’s life that was not translated correctly from the novel to the film; the description of Maria LaSalle was also lost in translation when trying to create her to be an on screen character. In the novel, Rob describes that “Marie is pretty, in the that nearly cross-eyed American way – she looks like a slightly plumper, post Partridge Family, pre-L.A. law Susan Dey – and if you were going to develop a spontaneous and pointless crush on somebody, you could do a lot worse” (77). Describing Marie as being similar to an actress from the American television show the Partridge Family gives the

Get Access
Related
Get Access