How to tell a film is based on a book:
1: A Home At The End Of The World
Lots of stuff happens. Very little of it makes any sense. The characters tend to be uncommunicative and quiet, you can tell there is shedloads of internal monologue going on in their heads. Pages and pages and pages of the stuff.
Take A Home At The End Of The World: The lead character’s family dies off by the age of fourteen (in grisly ways occasionally), he moves in with his best mate, tries out being gay, is rejected, becomes a baker, moves to New York, becomes part of an unconventional threeway family, move to the country, have a kid, gets left by the mother and kid and his best mate gets AIDS. Full on tear-jerker plot, with potential feelgood leanings as we see how these problems are dealt with. Yet I found the whole thing almost completely emotionless. I suppose it is nice for a film to allow us to fill the emotion in for the characters, not rely on a score or obvious histrionics; but actually that is not what the limited running time of a film does well. You do get the feeling that Cunningham’s script of his own book was greenlit only due to the success of The Hours, and unsurprisingly suffers a similar remoteness.