Extremely Loud and Incredibly Distanced

There is an interview in the paper today with Jonathan Safran Foer. The headline tells us that it is about the movie that was made based on his novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, but it is really about how people shouldn't attack books or authors because they have never hurt anybody, but that they should (verbally) attack politicians and terrorists instead. In between, Foer says that he watched the movie, that he liked it, but that he does understand why so many people hate it. He thinks it is because it is about 9/11, and people don't want to talk about that, or think about that, because it is too painful or because it will make them think about things that they just want to keep plain and simple.
Now I haven't actually seen the movie, but I've read enough about it to know what went wrong there. Any time Tom Hanks decides to quickly buy the film rights of a great novel, you should be very wary. He is not doing this because he loved the novel, or because he is afraid that somebody else will make a worse movie than he will, he is doing this because he knows it will make him a lot of money. And then he ensure that he himself will play the main character, which makes him even more money. Now in the novel, the story is divided in half between what the protagonist, Oskar Schell, tells us and letters that were written by his grandparents (to him or to his father). When I read that Tom Hanks was going to be in the movie, I imagined he would be playing the grandfather, which I thought was kinda neat, even though he was a little too young for that. Then I found out that they had actually scrapped the whole grandparents part of the story, just took them out, and somehow inserted Oskar's father back into the film, and that is who Hanks is playing. Now someone should really tell that guy that he is too old to play someone who is supposed to be in their early forties. But apart from that, his character is dead in the novel. That is the whole point of the novel. You can't go and put him back in, because everybody will know that the only reason you put him back in is because Tom Hanks is playing him. It is purely ego-tripping.
So Mr. Foer, I think most people are hating that movie not because of the subject matter, but because they ruined your book.
But I don't think that actually matters much to him. As he says in the interview, he knows why they changed things. They made a Hollywood blockbuster and those are supposed to appeal to a lot of people (which isn't really working out here, but okay). He would have made an arthouse movie, when given the chance. But he wasn't given the chance, and so he didn't participate in any way in the making of this film. He even says that when he watched in cinema, he cried at the end of the film, while he doesn't cry about his book (which I thought was magical, because I think few people can read that book and not cry). So really, he doesn't see it as his story anymore, it is just some Hollywood film about family and a search and memories and death and he was moved by that and it made him cry. End of story.
I think that is great. As a writer, you must be able to let go of your stories and have others tell them, perhaps in a slightly different way, because a story can never belong to you, it is just the way you told it that belongs to you, but all the rest of it is free to be told over and over again. Now the way Foer told the story, with his experimental use of photos and type and colour and letters and thoughts, is something that you can never put in a film, but also something that is uniquely him. So I think he is one of those few people who can rest assured that nobody is going to "steal" his story, because he is the only one who could have told it exactly that way. And he does rest assured. He clearly shows that this movie doesn't have that much to do with his novel, as far as he is concerned.
Maybe the rest of us should do the same, just don't think too much about how great and wonderful and innovative that novel is, but just go and watch the movie as if it is a fresh telling of a fresh story (I try to do this with most films that are made of novels, but sometimes you just can't help and go "Seriously? You didn't understand a thing about that novel! Whyyy did you spoil that for me??" But hey, that just shows how much you care, right?). My guess is that we will be happier all around.