I wonder whether Christopher Buckley likes the film version of his novel, THANK YOU FOR SMOKING even though, as a film, it invariably leaves out so much of the bite and plot of his wonderfully satiric story. Does he think this adaptation is faithful to the book? This raises the question that all lovers of fiction face whenever one of their favorite books is adapted into a film: Is the book better, and if so, should we just accept the fact that a film is simply going to tell the story of the novel in a different way–more visual, less nuanced, and more dependent on the directed eye of the filmmaker than on the freestyle wanderings of the imagination.
This same question applies to some of the other films in the Festival–specifically, “A Time to Kill,” “A Civil Action,” and “In the Bedroom.”
