It is an old cliché that films of books must be inferior to the books themselves. It is not always true. For instance, read Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and see whether you disagree (the writing is pedestrian and the plotting is incoherent, which is why the movie has a different storyline). Then of course there is David Nicholls’ first novel, Starter For Ten, which was fun but nothing like as good as the film adaptation (in no small part thanks to James McAvoy). The adaptation of David Nicholls’ One Day, a coming-of-age novel about love and fulfilment, hits our cinema screens this autumn.
But clichés are not clichés for nothing. Unlike Starter For Ten, which began life as a screenplay, One Day does not feel as cinematic. Much of the funniest or most poignant narrative is thought, rather than spoken. Voice-overs are an obvious option but it would be a crime against literature if One Day began to sound like Bridget Jones’ Diary. The quirky structure is a potential problem. It will take some very smart direction to make sure that the film doesn’t feel stilted and rushed, like the highlights reel of a series of 24. Then there is the casting. Unlike some people, I couldn’t give two hoots that Anne Hathaway, a glamorous, smiling American, is playing Emma Morley, an awkward, working-class English lass. She can act, as anyone who has seen Rachel Getting Married will know. My real concern is that Hathaway’s Emma is set to be “warmer” than in the book.
The success of One Day starts and ends with its beautifully composed main characters – beyond them you have an unoriginal plot (superficially reminscent of When Harry Met Sally), and a two-dimensional supporting cast (rare exceptions being Ian and Sylvie). Alter the manner of Emma or her louche, affluent foil Dexter Mayhew and you risk damaging the heart of One Day’s lure and appeal.
The main characters would not be so magical, of course, if it weren’t for the writing. Nicholls has an eye for detail that doesn’t just fire your imagination – it taps your memories. An exemplar scene is the first, Dexter lying in bed, considering Emma’s bedroom. He’s seen many girls’ rooms like this, where ‘you were never more than six feet from a Nina Simone album’.
“The burnt out nightlights and desolate pot plants, the smell of washing powder on cheap, ill-fitting sheets. She had that arty girl’s passion for photomontage too; flash-lit snaps of college friends and family jumbled in amongst the Chagalls and Vermeers and Kandinskys, the Che Guevaras and Woody Allens and Samuel Becketts. Nothing here was neutral, everything displayed an allegiance or a point of view. The room was a manifesto.”
How do you bring that out on screen? On top of Nicholls’ gift for observation, it is one of the funniest novels that you will read for a long time, and surprisingly one of the most moving. When an author spends most of the book making you laugh, it is even more poignant when they make you cry.
Believe the hype, the gushing appraisals, and the lurid cover’s ubiquity on bus, beach and bedside tables. I expect that the film will be good but as instantly forgettable as it is likeable. For reasons stylistic and structural, it will not be able to take you on the same journey that you travel in the book. One Day leaves you emotionally exhausted and so intimately involved in the characters’ hopes, fears and desires that for some time afterwards you feel as though you have known Emma and Dexter your whole life.
And in a special, introspective way, you sort of have.
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