Why I Loved the Book Luckiest Girl Alive but Hated the Movie
When the book Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll was released in 2015, I was eager to read it. Once I got it I couldn’t put it down. Literally. Couldn’t. Put. It. Down.
I loved the main character of TifAni “Ani” FaNelli, loved how she painstakingly created a new life for herself, a life she wanted to have more than anything else as a young adult to make up for what happened to her in her in her freshman year at a prestigious private school.
I understood her desperate need back in school to be liked by the popular girls and become the girlfriend of a good-looking popular young male athlete at her school. I nodded my head knowingly at the cruel bullying of those same girls who delighted in torturing her, and understood her sadness at being rejected by that boy. I suffered inside and cried reading the graphic details of her gang rape. She’s a survivor of catastrophic circumstances. As a teenager, she underwent a series of horrifying and emotionally crippling events, including a school shooting. I couldn’t stop reading it.
And when I was finished reading it, I read again. And again. Especially when I was stressed, frustrated at my job, or just needed the comfort of Knoll’s familiar, perfect way of putting a storyline together. Truth be told I wasn’t all that happy with the ending, (I think she should have married Luke and forgotten the pain of the past), but as an author myself, I have had people tell me that they weren’t happy with an ending of one of my books. I get it, I understand.
So loving the book as I do, I was happy to hear that it had been made into a movie by Netflix and I eagerly waited to see it. However, when I did get to watch it, my disappointment was palpable. At first I thought that maybe a scriptwriter had doctored certain parts of the story such as making her mother a strong divorcee who had worked hard all her life to give Ani a good start in life. In the book Mom Fanelli was a kept housewife who never worked but racked up credit card debt over and over again. Not the same character at all.
However, as the credits rolled I saw that the name of Jessica Knoll was listed as having written the script. She herself had made the changes.
I also thought that the choice of actors to play critical parts was, well, horrible. The physical images of her characters, so well-defined by Knoll, was completely dismissed. Her teacher Andrew Larson was described in the book so different physically than the actor who portrayed him, as were her best friend Nell, and her fiancé Luke. The worst was the actor chosen to play Arthur who was described as wearing glasses, very overweight, and with bad acne. The actor was slim, had a clear face, and did not wear glasses.
The only two people who fit the characters description-wise were Jennifer Beals as her editor/boss Lolo and the incredible Chiara Aurelia as a young Ani. Aurelia playing Ani in the rape scenes was emotionally shattering and as described in the book.
I understand that they are her characters, and believe me I know as an author, that she certainly can make changes as she sees fit. But the book left such a lasting impression on me, as did the physical descriptions of the characters, that the transition of the story to a movie seems to have lost something important.
I love when a book and a movie mesh well and the movie keeps the story intact. As much as I love and recommend reading Luckiest Girl Alive, I do not recommend the movie.
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