Charlie St. Cloud

It's been several months since I read the wonderful novel The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud, and as I mentioned in the review: they made a movie out of it.

Let me say this, right here and right now: Hollywood doesn't get it right often. I mean, sure, they're smart enough to know a moneymaking plot when they see one. But that doesn't mean they'll do a good job of converting a masterful novel into an equally masterful movie. In rare instances, it happens. And I applaud them. But more often than not, the film misses exactly the mark the book hits.

And yet any time a book I've loved is made into a movie, I have to see it. I'm inevitably drawn toward the theater (or, you know, Netflix) and I find myself watching a visual adaptation of that work I so dearly loved when it was only printed word and all of the visuals existed in my imagination.

I found the film version of this book lacking. And this is why: it didn't allow for the idea that Sam, too, moves on in the end. One of the loveliest things about the novel's ending is that Charlie gets to see Sam one last time--actually see Sam--but it isn't the younger-brother-as-he-was. Charlie gets to see that when he moves on, Sam moves on. In the end, he sees a young adult version of Sam--someone that Sam simultaneously could have been but still gets to be, after a fashion. They both get to move forward. In their own ways, they both get to have futures.

And while yes, that makes the book ending more than a little sentimental and while yes, some people don't believe in anything after death and that makes the whole premise...difficult...I appreciate the impression Ben Sherwood left behind in the novel, which is that Sam does have somewhere to move forward and onward. He doesn't just simply stop existing. Charlie, after all, still lives. But it's difficult to think of Sam being a nebulous child-like entity, even if he's in heaven.

But those are just my thoughts. And maybe I just need to avoid filmic adaptations of my favorite works. They never turn out as well as they could.