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Remarkable said:
I actually think it was rather a difficult book to turn into a film.

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That's a strange thing to say. The book was practically written as a film.

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Dazzle said:

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Remarkable said:
I actually think it was rather a difficult book to turn into a film.

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That's a strange thing to say. The book was practically written as a film.

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What made the book difficult to translate into an effective screenplay was the fact that so much of it consisted of expository dialogue. Robert spends so much of the novel explaining things to Sophie (in response to all of her carefully-crafted questions) that if all of those conversations were included in the film it would be a bore to watch. Film is first and foremost a visual medium, so we don't want to spend a lot of time watching people talk to one another, we want to see them doing things that are visually interesting.

A film adaptation of a novel invariably has to find clever ways to craft scenes in such a way that much of the expository dialogue is rendered unnecessary, or minimized. Often this is done through flashback sequences to "show" what the character would otherwise just be "explaining". Unfortunately when the novel consists almost entirely of that sort of expository dialogue, it gets difficult to find enough creative ways to convey all of that information without overusing the flashback trick.

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...but what about the elephant in the room everyone ignores: that the Catholic Church worships The Virgin Mary ?

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And what about the other elephant? Mary can't have been a virgin, can she?

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Remarkable said:
Mary can't have been a virgin, can she?

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Well, that depends on how you define "virgin." The Church has historically interpreted the word to mean a woman who has not had sexual intercourse with a man--a woman free of "carnal sin" (since it was believed that men passed sin on to women by sexual means). The fact that Mary became pregnant without having had sex with a man is what made it "obvious" that she'd been impregnated by divine means--a miracle. God had knocked her up, so to speak, and so technically she was still a virgin, still without carnal sin, and her offspring would be free of original sin as a result.

The Catholics, in their literal wisdom, decided that the technicality of Mary having been born of carnal sin made her an unfit vessel for bearing the Christ, so they felt the need to come up with the concept of Immaculate Conception to explain how she had had her own soul "protected" by God at the time she was conceived, thus keeping her free of original sin.

This, in turn, is why so many Christians object to the idea that Jesus might have ever had children of his own--the element of carnal sin involved in the sex act would seem to tarnish his halo somewhat. Jesus can be said to have been "conceived without sin" due to the way Mary was impregnated, but if Jesus had sex with Mary Magdalene, their offspring would be tainted with original sin, just like the rest of us, and the participants would become sinners in the process. This would challenge the "divinity" of Jesus and send the Church right back to the First Council of Nicaea.

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