Where The Crawdads Sing: Adaptation of Bestseller Faithful to the Point of Redundancy
By Kim Hughes
Rating: C
Can a movie adapted from a smash bestseller produced by Reese Witherspoon and boosted by an original song by Taylor Swift really go sideways? In the strictest sense, no.
But the new adaptation of Delia Owens’ 2018 novel Where the Crawdads Sing is a sharp reminder that fanciful fiction very often unfolds best inside one’s head, where the reader’s imagination persuasively conjures the look and feel of the characters and settings while processing the iffy bits in a tangential way requiring less scrutiny.
Certainly, the film’s principal cast — Daisy Edgar-Jones as Kya, the story’s protagonist, in her young adult years alongside Taylor John Smith as her true love Tate Walker, Harris Dickinson as the scoundrel Chase Andrews who dupes her and ends up dead, and David Strathairn as Kya’s defence attorney — are committed and earnest.
Director Olivia Newman’s film, based on a screenplay by Lucy Alibar (dig the female energy abounding here) is entirely faithful to the book. But something about seeing Kya, a.k.a. The Marsh Girl and her shack so precisely rendered on screen feels disconnected from the powerful images marshalled by Owens in her lovely book.
In this instance, filmgoers unfamiliar with the source material might be better served by the movie which opens with Kya and her large extended family living dirt poor in the wilds of North Carolina. Beloved mama paints, drunken dad pummels and soon, young Kya is on her own after first her mom, then her many elder siblings split to escape the violence at home. It’s not long before nasty dad, too, leaves little Kya to her own defences.
Somehow in the book, the idea of a child being completely abandoned and figuring out how to live alone seems, if not wildly unlikely, as least possible given the story’s fertile, woodsy setting and the fact that Kya’s family’s poverty necessarily made innovation a requisite for survival.
Yet seeing child Kya (Jojo Regina) harvesting mussels for sale at the one-stop shop operated by Mabel and Jumpin’ (Michael Hyatt and Sterling Macer Jr.) — who become her surrogate parents and source for extras like shoes and clothing — looks vaguely ridiculous here. Granted, she’s in a backwater in the middle of the 20th century, but surely one of those sneering, judgmental townies could have popped by with a tuna casserole for a chat?
Anyway, things improve as the Marsh Girl gets older and hotter, which attracts the attention of duplicitous Chase who can make romantic inroads with Kya now that childhood friend and defender Tate is away at college, leaving Kya alone.
Essentially an us-versus-them story, Kya goes to trial for the murder of Chase but what’s really on trial is her lifestyle, her class and poverty, and her willingness to associate so closely with Black folks who, in 60s-era North Carolina, are very much third-class citizens.
Other dogeared themes prop up Where the Crawdads Sing: perseverance, personal agency, the power of love, and, in the story’s neat twist (taken wholesale from the novel) how sweet revenge can be when served cold.
Where the Crawdads Sing is recommended, and part of me liked it. But I confess to feeling a bit bored and, surprising even to myself, a bit disappointed that the filmmakers, in the quest to honour Owens’ book, created something without a single surprise in casting, setting or anything else.
The balance between faithful and innovative can be struck: witness Witherspoon’s ace portrayal of writer Cheryl Strayed in late director Jean-Marc Vallée’s riveting adaptation of her memoir, Wild. Maybe non-fiction is the key, with quasi-fantasy either best left on the page or rendered with less painstaking attention to details that were imaginary to begin with.
Where The Crawdads Sing. Directed by Olivia Newman. Screenplay by Lucy Alibar based upon the novel by Delia Owens. Starring Daisy Edgar-Jones, Taylor John Smith, Harris Dickinson, Michael Hyatt, Sterling Macer, Jr. and David Strathairn. Opens in theatres July 15.