MovieChat Forums > The Girl in the Book (2015) Discussion > My favorite character, also the demise (...

My favorite character, also the demise (spoilers)


If the film had stayed focused on the elements that other viewers apparently found disturbing, I think I would have given the film very high reviews. The complexity of a teenage girl coming of age, doing things she later regretted, with a man she respected but who took advantage of her -- all of that was well done with believable tension, nuance and repercussion.

And then my favorite character comes along. Emmitt brought the best out of Alice, all while not being so in-your-face with his moral platitudes that he's obnoxious. He's a truly good guy, and Alice takes a while to see how worthwhile it is to fight for that, after her believable-but-reprehensible infidelity with the babysitter. Heck, even her best friend had believable complexity and nuance in her reaction to what happened.

What ruined the film for me was the "100 reasons you should forgive me" thing. It was flat storywriting, compared to the psychological depth and complex character development we saw elsewhere in the film. Of course, a lot of films do this (I believe) in the penultimate scenes, letting the writing get lazy. I just thought a movie about writers would have had more rigorous editing of its own screenplay.

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