Hello, mouse! Unspeakable sadness opened two huge eyes.
Kind, incredibly touching, weak-minded Charlie has a simple and understandable dream, or rather a simple childhood desire to become smart.
In the book, he works in a bakery, diligently goes to night school, struggles with countless "Abugs" and receives support from an understanding and caring teacher Alice. In the film, he works as a janitor, leading the usual invisible life of a mentally retarded person.
The film has two poles. One positive is the actor, amazingly and incredibly played Charlie, the second negative is the free treatment of the source text of the novel. I don’t want to fall into direct comparisons, but the film doesn’t explain much, hides, changes. Let the authors and screenwriters do not retain the form of the narrative of the book – self-reports of Charlie, showing with filigree accuracy the changes in his condition, but how not to show his dreams, his relationship with his family, humiliating visits to a psychologist, the confrontation between two doctors who treated him in an experiment, love for Alice.
There is so much drama and conflict in the book that it is impossible to read calmly, and the film, unfortunately, took it out of brackets. When a storyline is redrawn in this way, something must remain in place or the director’s special emphasis is placed on something. In my opinion, the film sharpens the moment of transition from a backward man to a genius, but the whole context is blurred. From the good Charlie, we are shown a hard-dry, almost completely insensitive Charlie, and he was not. He had many more questions to those around him than those answers, and in this tragic misunderstanding the hero could not exist. He wasn’t always right... the extraordinarily high intellect took its price and Charlie became more focused on himself, his experiences, his giftedness, ceasing to notice others. But he still loved, felt, experienced, feared. But only in the book.
As the famous aphorism goes – knowledge-power, and the film perfectly showed all its destructive power, if this force is directed against itself, and you can no longer stop this process.
The book poses a lot of questions that are probably difficult to give unambiguous answers. From the most obvious: what is better – to be unhealthy and “not see” the world around you or “see” when you feel everything as it really is? To more specific: does science have the right to change human life in such a cardinal way, by and large without bearing responsibility for it? The regression of development and the inability to stop it is the irreparable fault of scientists who have only to spread their hands and reap the fruits of their desire for a scientific revolution. With good intentions, you know what is paved. But they can not be condemned, because science is discoveries and risks, but only a guinea pig and a guinea pig are not the same thing. Is it worth going against nature if it makes you who you are? In the end, everything came to the starting point, the circle closed ... progressive science and human thought still loses to the higher forces of the universe, which for the same reason do not allow to turn the rivers back, clone people, cross the unbreeding, change the climate, etc.
Every human life is unique and it is certainly easier to intervene than to solve the consequences of your intervention. And this film is brilliant with its ending, which touched to the core and showed all the loneliness, abandonment and unbearability of Charles’ life.
I think the film will leave almost no one indifferent, regardless of whether or not they are familiar with the original novel. He took the main pain points of Keyes’s work and tried to show the fate of a good little man, who for a short moment thought that the whole world was in his hands and he defeated him, and then it turned out that in the whole world there was no one closer and clearer than the nimble little Algernon.
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