Book Vs. Movie: Sarah's Key

I was ready to write this blog before I even saw the movie. Book versus movie? The book would win, of course. It always does. Bookworm Kayla and I read Sarah's Key a few months ago, and we both gave it a three-to-four stars on Good Reads. For those who haven't read it, here's a snippet from the book's description: "On Vel' d'Hiv's [the forced deportation of Jewish families in France during WWII] 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France's past. Through her contemporary investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connect her to Sarah." I personally would have given it at least four stars if the ending had come together better. (Still, I did very much enjoy the book.) My issue with the ending actually leads into the point I want to make here. Basically, I felt like there was too much crammed in at the end and it started to feel like a new book. Once Julie figured out the mystery about Sarah, it seemed like the book should've ended, but uncovering that story had all kinds of implications on her life that she needed to work out.

Interestingly, I felt like the movie was able to deal with that fallout better than the book was. Movies can show other characters' points of view a little more naturally than books can, so in the movie, we saw how the truth about Sarah affected a couple other characters besides Julia. For me, this meant not having so much disparate information crammed into the final pages of Julia's narrative and also intuitively understanding that the story wasn't over yet. I don't know if that makes sense, but I just thought it was an interesting difference between the book and movie.

On another note, the imagery in the movie was extremely hard to watch, another difference from the book. Both Kayla and I agreed the movie was more powerful in that way, without ever seeming to take advantage of such a horrible events. If you put the two of us together, we probably cried through the whole movie. Finally, most of the acting was very good, although there were just a couple forced scenes.

All in all, I'm going to take the easy route and say the two versions are tied, but if I wanted to go out on a limb, I'd say I prefered the movie better.

Did you read the book or see the movie? If so, what did you think?