“Song of the river crabs” is one of the outstanding literary phenomena of today. Four years after it was published, it is still at number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and at number eight on Stimatsky’s list. An impressive achievement also in light of the fact that this is the debut novel of Delia Evans, a zoologist by profession who recently made headlines due to her alleged involvement in a murder case.
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Also at the center of the book is a criminal case – fictitious in his case. It is about the mysterious death of Chase Andrews, one of the most popular guys in North Carolina in the 1960s. The main suspect in the murder is the true heroine of the novel: a girl named Kaya, who lives on the fringes of society, outside of civilization, and the townspeople who came across her mockingly nicknamed her “the swamp girl”.
The book skips between different time periods, and describes Kaya’s coming of age and the relationships she developed with two completely different guys: Chase, who turns out to be a serious douchebag and sexual predator, and Tate, who helps her make the most of her research, writing and drawing skills. The book also describes the special relationship between the heroine and the nature that surrounds her, and at the same time how she learns to integrate into the company of humans. In addition, he follows the investigation of the murder and the legal process that accompanies it, and in the meantime describes the nature of life around the swamp.
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In my opinion, the book is wonderfully written – complex and convoluted but also coherent and engrossing. You can understand why he was so successful, because he has many qualities and virtues. He is able to give a sense of time and place, and present us with a world we did not know. He succeeds in building a unique, captivating and empathetic heroine, and is good at combining different genres – anthropological folklore, legal suspense drama and romantic melodrama. In addition to this, he deals with current and relevant issues, primarily sexual violence against women.
It was clear that at some point the book would become a movie, and it happened this summer. The film adaptation came out in America a few weeks ago, and it came to us this week, with the main role being played by the British Daisy Edgar-Jones, who thanks to the series “Normal People” has become one of the most promising young actresses at the moment.
There is no more condescending statement than “the book was better”, but what if that’s the best way to sum up this adaptation. Only two elements in it make successful use of cinematic expression: the nature shots, which spectacularly revive the descriptions of the landscape in the novel, and the ending, which makes good use of editing to describe the passage of time in an exciting way. Beyond that, the film is inferior in every sense compared to the original, and mediocre by every measure.
It is too short to list the problems of the film. Here are a few: the book is rich in different storylines, and the film adaptation tries to cram them all in, but although it lasts about two hours, it does so in a superficial and hasty way. Unlike the novel, he also fails to build tension around the murder case.
The book was so successful also because it was so detailed and specific. It had, for example, a lot of descriptions of food – the film doesn’t have that. When you read the book, you can feel for a moment that you are in the same time and place as the characters. When you see the film, there is no such feeling. The design of the characters is also lacking: Chase and Tate neither look nor act like guys from North Carolina in the 1950s and 1960s, nor is Kaya convincing as a “swamp girl”. They look like they stepped out of a modern-day lacrosse club in California, and she looks like a hipster barista from a London coffee shop.
Edgar-Jones will surely do many great things, but in this film she fails to give the character of Kaya cinematic life. All around, the performances of the supporting actors and actresses are terrible almost without exception. Among the unknown names, David Straightharn stands out, one of the veteran character actors in contemporary American cinema, who plays the heroine’s lawyer, but even he is not at his best, and seems to have been working on automatic pilot.
In short, “Crayfish Song” joins a never-ending and probably inevitable parade of mediocre adaptations of great books. The only interesting thing about it is the story behind its production.
Well, the movie was produced by Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine company. The company aims to promote as many women as possible, both in front of the camera and behind it. So first of all she chose to bring to the screen a book written by a woman, whose protagonist is a woman, and which deals with female empowerment. After that, unusually for Hollywood, almost all the senior positions in the project were filled by women. Olivia Newman took the baton of directing, Polly Morgan was responsible for cinematography, Lucy Oliver wrote the script, Taylor Swift wrote the closing song, and the list goes on.
The naysayers said that these progressives would further collapse the industry, but the facts say otherwise: the film recorded good financial achievements at the United States box office, relative to the age of epidemics in which we live, and in Israel it seems to have an audience as well. I saw the film at a regular commercial screening on a Tuesday, and the theater was packed. Proof that you can make money even when you stand on the right side of history.