Starting off, I’d like to say that I really liked the Norwegian Wood movie. I have to admit I went in a bit skeptical. To me, Norwegian Wood is a deep dive into the psyche of traumatized people, and I think attaining something at that level of depth on screen, without the benefit of internal monologue and events colored by first-person perspective, is immensely tricky. Other types of movies I’ve seen that attempted to tackle similar types of introspective source material have never particularly worked – it’s too tempting to rely on cheesy voiceover or overly long artsy shots, neither of which can capture the narrative as well as the text can. And don’t get me wrong, there was a fair amount of what I would consider to be cheesy voiceover and artsy, quiet cinematography in Norwegian Wood. Yet in respect to whether or not the movie adequately depicted the more subtle events of the text, I felt the film did a good job.
Part of what worked, I think, was the visual detail of the film. The 70s setting was definitely hammered in through décor and costumes, and to me it really worked to make the story feel real. The sanatorium felt appropriately quiet and peaceful, with just enough of that eerie sense of seclusion. The student riots, brought to life by extras and actors, gave a bit of extra oomph to an event I previously didn’t have a lot of reference for. In my opinion the visuals are most of the reason to make a book into a movie in the first place, and this film nailing them meant a lot to me.
Unfortunately, said visuals couldn’t make up for the difficulties of adapting such a subtle novel onto the big screen. Some of my favorite bits of the text were simple descriptions of how Watanabe interpreted the world, and even when those things appeared in the film they didn’t quite click for me in the same way. That made parts of the movie hit or miss. For example, hit: Nagasawa, who was perfectly acted as a materialist jerk who’s too charismatic to fail, and also Watanabe’s disgust with Nagasawa and by extension himself, which I found was translated very well in the film. Miss: Reiko, whose older, sunny warmth came off much more calculated in the movie, and whose complex personality felt mostly lost in the jump between page and film.
Some changes made in the movie weren’t wholly good or bad but were simply so different that they took a bit of adjustment on my part. Naoko, for example, I thought was well acted. However, Rinko Kikuchi played Naoko as working to appear almost happy in the beginning portion of the film, with her eventually becoming more honestly emotive (especially with negative feelings like anger, frustration, and grief) as the film went on. I didn’t mind this choice at all and felt like Kikuchi did a good job portraying Naoko as a person putting on a front of happiness while tension boiled under the surface. This interpretation, however, definitely did not match how I saw Naoko when I read the book, which was as a girl who always seemed half-there, and who was almost fading or wasting away into the other world. The Naoko of my imagination was always fairly visibly traumatized, just in a quiet, tired sort of way.
All in all, as I mentioned, I really liked this film. I thought that, considering the difficulties of adapting this sort of story, it did a good job. I don’t think it was as effective as the original text, and in picking between the two the novel certainly wins out, but for what it was, the Norwegian Wood film pleasantly surprised me.
-Amanda
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