Movie Reaction: Where the Crawdads Sing

Formula: A Time to Kill / Primal Fear

 

I say this a lot, but it bears repeating. Novels and film are different media. There’s often a lot about them that overlap well, however that’s not a guarantee. Film has trouble with a first-person narration. Writing alone can’t convey physical images the same way as film. There is a long history of taking crime best sellers and turning them into films. John Grisham and others made a cottage industry of it in the 90s in particular, and it’s continued with the likes of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train. Where the Crawdads Sing is the next in this lineage. A lot more gets lost in translation with this adaptation than this film can withstand though.

 

The film (and book) tells the story of Kya (Daisy Edgar-Jones). She’s a little girl whose family lives isolated in the marsh near a small North Carolina town. Her father is an abusive alcoholic who drives everyone in the family away until it’s just Kya and him. He eventually leaves too, leaving Kya alone to fend for herself. She raises herself to adulthood, becoming a town outcast along the way. She does eventually bond with a local boy-then-man named Tate (Taylor John Smith) who teaches her to read before he disappears for college. Later, she becomes involved with the local quarterback (Harris Dickinson) whose mysterious murder she gets charged with. The film is actually set during the murder trial with flashbacks to her past mixed in.

 

Based on the movie alone, I have no idea why this book became such a sensation. I have guesses, but nothing that showed up in the movie. I imagine the language of the book is distinctive and poetic. The kind of language that reads well, but when said out loud by a human, sounds unnatural. There’s plenty of that in the movie. I suspect the romance is a selling point of the book. There’s a Nicholas Sparks feel to the setup of Kya’s pseudo-love triangle. The problem is that it’s pretty obvious which guy is right for Kya and which one will turn out to be a jerk. The biggest swing of the movie is how it structures everything around the trial. From what I’ve gathered, the book doesn’t do that, and that makes a lot of sense. The beats of the trial aren’t structured in a way that naturally invite flashbacks. I wasn’t watching the trial play out with the question of if Kya was responsible for the murder. The film makes it look like a town smear job the entire time, which telegraphs the plot twist that’s obviously coming. So, to recap, the dialogue is unnatural, there’s no mystery to the love triangle, and there’s no tension to the murder trial.

 

Something specific to this being a film is that it’s really hard to cast a character like Kya. In no world does Daisy Edgar-Jones look like someone who raised herself in the swamps. In the book, Kya’s attractiveness can be more abstract. She’s just pretty enough that a couple guys could like her but she’s wild enough to be a town reject. It’s harder in a film, because we they need to find someone hardened by years of scrapping in the marsh who is also a delicate romantic lead. Daisy Edgar-Jones much more describes the latter than the former. So, every time someone in the film talks about her like she’s Boo Radley, then I see a pretty woman in a sundress, it doesn’t compute. It’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t bother me if the rest of the movie worked.

 

It’s a shame because I actually think Daisy Edgar-Jones is pretty good in this. She works really well as a romantic lead in something. Despite Taylor John Smith and Harris Dickinson being pretty anonymous love interests, she finds believable chemistry with them. She’s really likable throughout. Maybe too likable. Whenever they talk about her as the town outcast, I’d think “But she’s so pleasant to everyone”.

 

Where the Crawdads Sing is a frustrating movie. It’s not very good, however, it’s not all that far from being pretty good. Very little in the movie works, but those things don’t miss by much. If they would’ve done a slightly better job showing how she was an outcast, then her struggle in the trial makes more sense. If it was less clear who the good love interest was then the question of how the one died is much more compelling. In the same way that small errors compound into big ones, small improvements could’ve compounded into a good movie.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend