Book and Movie Review: Ballet Shoes
Nov. 8th, 2009 09:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI watched the BBC adaptation of Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes earlier this year, and just this weekend finished the book. I liked the movie rather better than the book.
I have a theory about this, actually: I think that books with beautiful prose or an interesting narrative voice or psychological intricacies, while they can be adapted into successful movies, are always better as the original book (see Pride and Prejudice, for instance); whereas a book that relies on its plot will often make a better movie than book.
Ballet Shoes relies entirely on its plot for its appeal. The characters are very thinly sketched, even our three heroines: Pauline acts, Petrova likes cars, and Posy dances. Beyond that, they’re interchangeable, and I kept getting confused who was speaking or doing a thing. (This is especially a problem with Pauline and Petrova, who are close in age.)
It doesn’t help that Streatfeild has a tendency to tell when she really ought to show, and will often forget to either show or tell what the characters are feeling, so they seem to go through life as emotional blanks.
It’s much harder to make characters who are being acted out by actual people quite that interchangeable and lifeless, even in a poorly made movie.
And Ballet Shoes is not a poorly made movie. It is not perhaps classic, but it’s a very engaging children’s TV movie. The child-actors are uniformly excellent - I tried to pick a favorite of the heroines, but it’s really too much of an ensemble to choose – and the adult characters, although somewhat to the side as they should be in a children’s movie, are engaging too.
I particularly liked the filmmakers’ gentle reinvention of Sylvia, the children’s guardian. Without completely changing the character, they made her a more sympathetic character than in the book, where she’s ineffectual and incompetent and seems to need more care from the children than they do from her. (Of course in both book and movie, the family is living off the money the children earn acting; but in the movie Sylvia acts as emotional support, whereas in the book she can’t even do that.)
I wouldn’t recommend the book, except perhaps for someone who knows a young girl who loves ballet. The movie, on the other hand, would be a good family movie generally, or a good feel-good movie for an adult.
I have a theory about this, actually: I think that books with beautiful prose or an interesting narrative voice or psychological intricacies, while they can be adapted into successful movies, are always better as the original book (see Pride and Prejudice, for instance); whereas a book that relies on its plot will often make a better movie than book.
Ballet Shoes relies entirely on its plot for its appeal. The characters are very thinly sketched, even our three heroines: Pauline acts, Petrova likes cars, and Posy dances. Beyond that, they’re interchangeable, and I kept getting confused who was speaking or doing a thing. (This is especially a problem with Pauline and Petrova, who are close in age.)
It doesn’t help that Streatfeild has a tendency to tell when she really ought to show, and will often forget to either show or tell what the characters are feeling, so they seem to go through life as emotional blanks.
It’s much harder to make characters who are being acted out by actual people quite that interchangeable and lifeless, even in a poorly made movie.
And Ballet Shoes is not a poorly made movie. It is not perhaps classic, but it’s a very engaging children’s TV movie. The child-actors are uniformly excellent - I tried to pick a favorite of the heroines, but it’s really too much of an ensemble to choose – and the adult characters, although somewhat to the side as they should be in a children’s movie, are engaging too.
I particularly liked the filmmakers’ gentle reinvention of Sylvia, the children’s guardian. Without completely changing the character, they made her a more sympathetic character than in the book, where she’s ineffectual and incompetent and seems to need more care from the children than they do from her. (Of course in both book and movie, the family is living off the money the children earn acting; but in the movie Sylvia acts as emotional support, whereas in the book she can’t even do that.)
I wouldn’t recommend the book, except perhaps for someone who knows a young girl who loves ballet. The movie, on the other hand, would be a good family movie generally, or a good feel-good movie for an adult.
