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Silver Linings Playbook: Comparison between the book and novel

The Silver Linings Playbook a novel by Matthew Quick and Silver Linings Playbook a David O. Russell film. It was up for Best Adapted Screenplay at The Oscars and I really wanted to understand why, so I bought the book and read it.

You always hear that a book adapted to film ends in disaster, the film didn’t do it justice, they changed this and that. It’s true, it happens. My guess is the Director didn’t share the same vision the author did regarding the adaptation and then business gets in the way, the film loses direction and that’s why so many books fail in film. (This doesn’t just happen with books. Televsion show Avatar: The Last Airbender was turned into a movie.  It was horribly done, save for a few tricks,  and it rightfully flopped in the box office).

It’s a little hard to compare Silver Linings,film to book when I saw the Oscar nominated movie first. I really liked it and so I went into the reading with very high expectations . But I can’t help thinking that no matter the order I experienced them in, the movie would always come out on top.

There are many differences between the two. They really have to stand alone when being talked about. I’m not comparing them to rag on one or the other, it’s a good book. It’s a great film.  Just that you forget ones based off the other.

[Spoilers ahead]

For starters, Pat Peoples is the protagonist in the novel, he’s changed to Pat Solitano in the book. Totally exceptable, actually preferred,  but that’s just me. He narrates his story in both works but the thing is, in the book he sounds somewhat more like a well educated teenager while in the movie he speaks as a grown man who’s learned a lot from his recent experiences, but that’s in the voice overs so you could argue its the hindsight .

Let’s compare the Pats. I can’t help but think Pat Peoples and Pat Solitano are two fundamentally different characters. It’s more than just a name change. In the book, Pat is driven by a mentality, he wanted to be kind not right. And that’s what drove many of his decisions. In the film however, Pat’s motto was Excelsior: if you work hard and do everything right, and stay positive, you have a shot at a silver lining. So where Peoples is working on his kindness and how he treats others, Solitano had a more developed mentality.  He was willing to do whatever it took to get his happy ending, because he deserved it. Both believed that through positivism and improved physicalilty they would reach their silver lining.   In the dialogue of the movie Solitano speaks completely different, he’s all over the place,  with an excited manner, gestures, but also a calmness. He has a lack of filter. Unlike Peoples who’s a little more calculated with his words.

Pat is just one (giant) slice of the pizza. Because then there’s Tiffany Maxwell. She was my favorite character in the movie but in the book she was absent for so long I kept forgetting about her until she made more frequent appearances towards the end but this wasn’t nearly as much as in the movie. So that was disappointing. Portrayed as a depressed widow, Tiffany was blunt, dark,  mysterious and intriguing.  She came alive in the movie in a way the book just couldn’t do for me, but that’s my personal opinion and also biased because I saw the movie first. She had more depth in the movie, I think. They changed up her story and it just made more sense (in the book she and her husband had too much sex and she wanted it to slow down, through circumstances this eventually led to his death. while in the movie, she avoided sex with her husband, one day he went to buy her lingerie to get something going but he died on the way home. In both, the guilt leads to depression which drives her to go after sex with strangers). We were able to see Film-Tiffany outside of just how Pat saw her, it was more limited in the book. We were able to watch Tiffany and Solitano develop their very interesting friendship whereas in the book, all that was mentioned for chapters and chapters was that she liked to follow him when he ran and that sometimes he’d share his day with her. The movie developed them on screen and that’s one of the things that made the biggest difference. 

Now the plot.  I want to say the plots in the novel and film are entirely different but the end result is for the most part the same. Thing is, the movie made a lot more sense. That is to say, it had a much more natural flow to it. In Quick’s novel,  Peoples is released from a mental hospital into his mother’s custody. He doesn’t know he’s been there for years and his wife had divorced him when he was checked in. He also doesn’t remember what happened to get him checked into a mental hospital- Big difference number one ( in the movie he was released after only 8 months and he remembers everyhing). He meets Tiffany, and their entire development is Big Difference number 2.  Basically, you watch them fall in love on screen but are taken by surprise on page.

There’s a plot twist in the movie that doesn’t exactly exist in the book but should have with Nikki (the ever-mentioned wife), Pat and Tiffany. It’s a little up to how you see it but it’s a MAJOR difference.  And that’s the biggest difference I had a problem with, number 4 .

There are several themes and symbols present in both Silver Linings Playbooks, two of the more prominent ones being football and family . This is major difference numbers 5 and 6. Pat Peoples relationship with his father is basically none existent and be dealt tries anything he can to get his father to tall to him and spend time with him.  Pat Solitano, on the other hand, is welcomed home by his father immediately and it’s actually he who seeks to spend more time with his son while the latter puts not effort towards bonding. Football is a huge part of both stories. In the movie its used as a means of bonding between the men of the family, its almost religious ritual watching the Eagles play. The dad believes that following certain superstitions is what leads his team to the wins. In the book, football is also a source of bonding and it’s the only thing that brings father and son together. The family dynamic is completely different in both works. One shows a family struggling to keep it together until the dad cooperates and shows he cares and the other shows us a family united and helping Pat at all costs.

Even the minor characters are different. Pat’s best friend Ronnie is used more as a device to further show the audience Pat’s excelsior mentality in the movie and how he believes it’s up to you to be happy no matter what is going on.  In the book, he’s not much of a great friend but Pat overlooks it.

Essentially, the changes done to the characters and plot combined to make a movie that worked. It was solid, heart tugging and captivating. That’s not to say the original story,  the novel is not good in its own right. It is. It showed us more insight into Pat’s mind during certain scenes.

The book tells the story of a man trying to get a grip on what’s reality while getting back his family and bettering himself to be reunited with his wife. The film tells the story of a man trying to hold onto what he believes in amidst the surrounding negativity while also working to become the best person he could be. And both developed into more than just love stories between two unstable people but into stories about two people trying to make sense of what’s been turned upside down in their worlds.

All in all, The Silver Linings Playbook the novel tells a majorly different but mildly similar story than Silver Linings Playbook the film. However,  both deliver the idea that if you work hard and you stay positive you have a shot at a silver lining, that people are not their mental illnesess and just maybe they understand something we don’t.