MovieChat Forums > Spin (2003) Discussion > Love the movie. The book, not so much.

Love the movie. The book, not so much.


Half the reason I'm motivated to post this is simply to get some new discussion going on this wonderful (in my opinion) underappreciated movie. Looks like nobody has commented in about 4 years! But, I do have something to say that warrants saying on its own.

I understood from the credits that this movie was based on a novel. I went to the trouble to find the book on amazon.com so I could read it, motivated by my love of the movie. Well, when I started reading it, I was never so disappointed in my life.

The writing isn't bad. The main problem is that book is so sexually explicit. It describes in explicit detail sex between Ernesto and Margaret, between Eddie and Francesca, and maybe some other people too that I can't remember. It came as quite a shock reading it, compared to the movie being so tastefully done. And in fact in the movie, there's no indication that Eddie and Francesca had anything but a chaste relationship, particularly refreshing to find in a movie nowadays.

But I think even if I'd read the book before the movie, I still would have found it gratuitous.

Plus, in the book Francesca is a very different character. In the book, she's somewhat promiscuous, and Eddie is not the only guy in her life. Not that it necessarily wouldn't be perfectly legitimate to explore a character of that nature. But it's a let-down after the nice sweet girl-next-door Francesca of the movie.

So in the end, I have to conclude that upon adapting the book to a screenplay, James Redford did a wonderful job of improving upon the original source material. He took a dirty book and turned it into a sweet, bucolic, hopeful movie. As if directing it so well weren't enough of an accomplishment already.

So if you love this movie as I do and feel you just can't get enough and want to read the novel, my advice would be: don't bother! Just my two cents.

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