Adaptation
Patrick McCabe's accomplishment with The Butcher Boy was deemed unattainable in a film. During the screenwriting process, author McCabe wrote two drafts that digressed from the original novel, like "planets within planets within planets" according to Neil Jordan, consequently, Jordan wrote the third draft that was more faithful to the novel.
Neil Jordan captures Francie's schizophrenia by using voice-overs where the adult narrator Francie speaks with the child Francie. Andrew O'Hehir at Salon Entertainment criticizes Jordan and McCabe for an occasional "flavor of an after-school special purveying didactic lessons about abuse and victimization," and losing "the novel's Beckettian ambiguity." However, he argues that Jordan "brings a tenderness and sweetness" to the otherwise unforgiving subject matter.
Read more about this topic: The Butcher Boy (1997 Film)
Famous quotes containing the word adaptation:
“The real security of Christianity is to be found in its benevolent morality, in its exquisite adaptation to the human heart, in the facility with which its scheme accommodates itself to the capacity of every human intellect, in the consolation which it bears to the house of mourning, in the light with which it brightens the great mystery of the grave.”
—Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)
“In youth the human body drew me and was the object of my secret and natural dreams. But body after body has taken away from me that sensual phosphorescence which my youth delighted in. Within me is no disturbing interplay now, but only the steady currents of adaptation and of sympathy.”
—Haniel Long (1888–1956)
“Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring, through obeying the blind urge.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)