The Book Was Better: A New Series In Which I Argue What Screen Adaptations Did a Disservice to A Superb Literary Work
Every Secret Thing: If You Haven’t Seen (Or Heard) Of The Movie, Don’t — Here’s Why The Book is Better
Introduction
If you’ve read my columns on TV or film over the years you know that when I review a TV show or a film based on a novel I go out of my way not to read the book first because I want to give the show or film a fair shake. Many times after the fact I will argue why the TV show or film is an improvement or the adaptation (Little Fires Everywhere) or why you can read both and enjoy them equally (Apples Never Fall, the Will Trent novels.)
This series will be the other side of the coin: in which I take a hard look at film or TV adaptations of a novel I’ve read (either before or after the fact) and that I think the writers did a disservice to the source material. While I will allow a certain amount of creative license there are occasions when I believe the adaptor made choices that weakened the structure of the original work for reasons that are inexplicable to me because they would have led to a more interesting story.
In this case these will be recommendations for the book. I will do my best to avoid spoilers but in some cases it may be unavoidable.
Every Secret Thing by Laura Lippman
Last year while channel chasing through HBO I found myself drawn to an intriguing mystery called Every Secret Thing. The film tells the story of two girls named Ronnie and Alice who at the age of eleven were accused of killing a baby and sentenced to juvenile. Seven years later after they are released, another baby that resembles the one that was taken disappears and the detective who investigated the original case starts to follow them to find a connection.
The film had a good pedigree. Dakota Fanning played Ronnie and Danielle MacDonald played the overweight Alice. Elizabeth Banks, in a rare serious role, played the detective on the original case and Diane Lane played Helen, Alice’s mother who had a critical role in much of what happened. The director was Amy Berg and Nicole Holofcener, a brilliant screenwriter and director is associated with the screenplay. But there just seemed something about that was off.
When I learned that Laura Lippman had written the original novel I immediately sought it out. By this time I was already a fan of Lippman’s standalone work and was devouring her Tess Monoghan novels at a quick streak. I found the original novel extraordinarily dark, riveting and cold — and realized immediately that Berg and Holofcener, two creative forces who rarely step wrong had done the source material a spectacular disservice.
To be clear the basic structure of the plot is the same: the novel does involve the investigation into two teenagers who, days after they have been released from juvie become the targets of the investigation into the abduction of a teenage girl. The problem is, Berg and Holofcener choose to focus the film version far more on the relationship of the two girls as children and then adults and in relationship to the murder. In Lippman’s novel, the two girls are by far the least interesting characters: barely capable of thinking, not incredibly able to make coherent thoughts and there is no focus on the past. Indeed, much of the power of Lippman’s novel is how it argues that then and now the two girls had little role in their own destinies but even if they had, they wouldn’t be able to much with it.
Considering how much of Holofcener and Berg’s work involves women, its very striking that they chose to adapt a story that is focused entirely on female characters and then either omit or minimize to near irrelevance three women who are by the far the most important to the story and ignore the more important societal issues that involve it. Considering that this would have not only led to a deeper film but also dealt with more fascinating issues — racism, sexism, and class divide — its disappointing both woman took such a tame and traditional approach to the narrative.
Most shocking is how they essentially choose to make Helen and Alice Manning appear to be criminal masterminds in the eyes of Detective Porter. In a scene near the end of the novel she actually says about Alice:
In the big picture, she’s an amateur. I’ve been in interview rooms with truly scary characters. Alice Manning wasn’t one of them.”
And she thinks less of Helen who is also pushed up in a similar fashion: Asked how she goes on after everything she set in motion:
“She goes on because she doesn’t see it that way. Because she truly believes what she did was always well intentioned. Helen Manning is a woman inclined to always think well of herself.”
This hardly fits with the end of the film when Porter and her partner look at the Mannings speaking to the TV (in a scene that never plays out in the original book) as if they are the worst people they’ve encountered in all their years of investigating murders. In the novel Alice seems spectacularly stupid and inept and Helen, while somewhat selfish, recognizes how dangerous her daughter is and doesn’t bother to stand by her after a point.
In a way the decision to case Ronnie with Dakota Fanning does Fanning a disservice. Fanning was becoming more and more famous at the time and the writers seem to be determined to built her character up more at the expense of so many others. There’s a logic to this, of all the characters in the book Ronnie is pictured as the greatest monster of them all when in fact she’s more of a victim of circumstance than Alice is, and in the original novel Alice has managed to get away relatively clean with what she’s done. Ronnie’s fate, which I will not reveal here, is tragic and in a sense inevitable.
The problem is that in the original novel Ronnie and Alice are even bigger victims than they think and so much of the impetus of the action is put in play by a character who has next to no screentime in the film. And it is that decision that I believe truly undercuts the screen adaptation of Every Secret Thing and was in large part a reason why the film was so tepidly received by critics and audiences. The film version is a conventional story. Lippman’s novel is anything but.
Stepping back a bit in my review of Laura Lippman’s Prom Mom I mentioned that I was astonished despite her great credentials as a writers how few adaptations of Lippman’s works there had been for film or television. Having read quite a bit more of Lippman’s novels after the last six months I have a theory as to why. Though her Tess Monoghan novels and almost every standalone she’s written have female protagonists and the female characters are more dominant presences then the male ones they are also not particularly different from the male protagonists in the novels of say Dennis Lehane or Richard Price. By that I mean they are deeply flawed, frequently judgmental of others and perhaps most tellingly treat other women as bad as men treat female characters in other novels.
Tess Monoghan is as guilty of being led by the good looks of random men even if sometimes those men are married or if she’s in another relationship. The women in Tess’s life who she thinks are friends and even her family treat her very badly and she feels no remorse in doing the same. This is true of so many of the female characters in the standalones as well, particularly the neo-noirs she writes but just as often more conventional books. And perhaps most daringly Lippman argues that gender and race are not the most important divides as class is. In many of her books she argues that it is wealth and status that make a person a contemptuous bigot and that can apply whether you are a woman or African-American. Lippman would not hold to the idea that if women ruled the world it would be a paradise and Every Secret Thing written in 2003 is her first standalone where that argument is central to the plot.
We are never allowed to forget that Cynthia Barnes is the victim of the worst thing that can ever happen to a mother so it may be Lippman’s greatest trick as a writer that at no point in the novel does Barnes ever come across as a sympathetic character. More striking by the time the novel comes to its end, the reader has every reason to fear for the child currently being raised by Cynthia (she’s essentially a replacement for Olivia) because it’s clear she’s not only being raised in a house without love but that her mother may not be capable of showing it to her when she gets older.
Cynthia Barnes is the daughter of a prominent African-American judge and therefore comes from a position of power and wealth that is rare for African-Americans to enjoy in Baltimore. Yet Barnes is, if anything, far more of a bigot than so many of the white people in Maryland: when Brittany Little is abduced Cynthia goes out of her way to actually say that it might be better off for the daughter to be taken then raised by this woman. She thinks that she is better than everyone around her and never remotely thinks that she’s luckier than most people of her race or gender. And in case we are given to think the trauma shaped her, Lippman makes it very clear she had those positions well before her infant daughter was taken.
Late in the novel you get the feeling that Cynthia’s bitterness isn’t so much at her daughter’s abduction or murder but because “she was guilty of wanting to live an enviable life’. She had a key position working for the mayor (who in earlier chapters she clearly thinks she’s better than) and her husband was the most successful black plaintiff’s attorney in town. She ‘allowed the city magazine to run photographs of her home’ — by that time it’s clear she wanted to make it clear to the city of their opinion of her. She let it be known that she was one of those women who was ‘juggling, that she had returned to her job at the mayor after a mere three months off — and gotten her figure back in a remarkable six months off’.” The magazine is published two months after Olivia is abducted and killed but it’s clear Cynthia is angrier that her perfect life was disturbed even more than the death of her infant.
Cynthia Barnes believes she is superior to the world, including her husband at the time. She went into work because she didn’t think the mayor could be trusted and she left him with a baby-sitter she picked because based on her appearance, she thinks it impossible she would be ‘distracted by a boy’. Cynthia judges everyone on appearances and finds all of them inferior to her. Lippman implies that in the normal course of events Olivia would have been raised by babysitters and nannies, attended the best schools and the best colleges and that her family would have only used her for social events rather than personally raised her.
And even when her daughter is murdered she refuses to grieve. She is actually ordered to leave a victim’s group when it becomes clear she feels that she has nothing in common with people who lost children the same way. The implication is that Cynthia isn’t mourning her daughter but is furious that her perfect world was ruined by white trash.
Essentially she uses her family’s power and influence to make sure that two eleven year old girls essentially get the harshest punishment under the law. We later learn that her father threatened that if this didn’t happen they were planning to change the rules so that juvenile offenders were tried in adult court. When she learns that Alice and Ronnie have been released, she goes out of her way to make sure that they are punished for what they did.
The moment Brittany Little is abducted, she begins to start pulling strings: she demands to talk to the detective in charge, goes out of her way to visit the victim, makes calls to a local reporter (also absent from the book) all in order to arrange a lynch mob for the two women in the court of public opinion. That Brittany Little was taken by one of the girls is almost incidental (here the book and movie are identical) and even knowing this I wondered if Cynthia had arranged for the abduction to happen. It’s clear by the novel’s end she’s been pulling strings longer than that, so it doesn’t seem impossible.
If the writers had the courage to take a more literal adaptation of the book, this would have been a darker and more powerful film. I can’t help but wonder if Shonda Rhimes ever read this novel because Cynthia Little is very much a precursor of the protagonists in Shondaland we’d meet a decade later. Olivia Pope and Annalyse Keating are not that far removed from the kind of dark, manipulative personality that Cynthia Barnes is in this novel. (Hmmm. Olivia Pope, Olivia Barnes…nah it has to be a coincidence.) And considering that this film came out in 2014 right around the time that Scandal and How To Get Away With Murder were shaking up Thursdays on ABC, this actually seems like the kind of story Rhimes could have adapted brilliantly.
And the novel is full of so many interesting women that the film didn’t bother to have. There’s Sharon, Alice’s original attorney who completely believes in the innocence of her client and is powered by liberal guilt more than guile in going forward. There’s Mira, a reporter at the Baltimore Beacon Light, who is stuck in the worst job at the paper because of the failures of her editor (humorously known as Nostrildamus) and ends up prone to the manipulation of Cynthia in the search of a good story. There’s the brief cameo of Rosario Bustamante, the leader of the most influential law firm in Baltimore who Sharon sells her soul to in order to get Ronnie the best deal possible and who seems to go through life with a permanent buzz on.
Even Nancy Porter is much different in the original novel; portly, arrogant and not above using harassment to make a statement in the press and being shocked when it backfires on her. By the end of the book she’s actually figured out Cynthia is pulling the strings behind everything and the two of them meet at her daughter’s grave. Cynthia thinks the meeting is beneath her and that Detective Porter doesn’t know anything. However when she makes her final statements about the Mannings, it’s clear to the reader (though not necessarily to Cynthia) that she knows exactly the role she played it in. Unlike Cynthia she is capable of seeing the bigger picture and can move on in a way it’s not clear Olivia is capable of.
Every Secret Thing the novel is a far more dark and haunting look into the human soul than the film we got even attempts at. One almost wonders if there’s a certain liberal guilt by the writers of the novel: that they found it easier to write a story where two poor white women are capable of committing a crime and manipulating the media than a wealthy African-American one who is a ‘scary character’ in a way Alice and Helen Manning aren’t. We may not have been ready in 2014 — or even now — to have a story like that told on the big screen where two girls are responsible for the kidnapping and murder of a baby are small fish compared to the real life monsters above them.
And that may be the real reason that Every Secret Thing died as quickly as it did at the box office and among critics. The film wants to try to be a dark story but at the end of the day is simply too traditional. When the detectives look at the Mannings at the end of the movie, they see the worst aspects of humanity and it leaves them cynical. When Detective Porter meets with Cynthia Barnes at the end of the book she’s looking at someone we have every reason to think is worse than the Mannings — but who even knowing what she does, has a far more interesting and complex attitude that will leave the reader far more impressed.